The international insurance market is a trillion-dollar industry (Source).

Selecting the right coverage can be incredibly complex for buyers, with a range of different providers offering a variety of membership levels.

On the provider side, when you sign up someone for an insurance plan, they rarely leave it.

Where I live, in fact, our beneficent government dramatically restricts your ability to change plans.

That’s an incredible business model for the insurance provider who is able to lock buyers into long-term contracts that are difficult to leave.

Naturally, given this lucrative and competitive landscape, many insurance providers are willing to pay for qualified, converting traffic.

In this niche report, I’m going to take a look at how insurance affiliate sites are acquiring traffic and converting it on different affiliate offers.

Some of the top affiliates like Nerd Wallet are producing some pretty slick creative. Check out how they’re promoting auto insurance (here’s the page).

Types Of Insurance Affiliate Programs

There are a bunch of different types of insurance options you can promote.

Liberty Mutual has a popular affiliate program- check out all their different offers:

1. auto & vehicle insurance affiliate program
2. property insurance affiliate programs
3. health insurance affiliate programs
4. pet insurance affiliate program
5. travel insurance affiliate programs
6. dental insurance affiliate programs
7. life insurance affiliate programs
8. identity theft affiliate programs
9. small business affiliate programs
10. accident affiliate programs
11. critical illness affiliate programs

Popular Programs & Networks

Some of the popular programs and networks include:

1. The Allstate Insurance Affiliate Program ($5-$20 per lead)
2. The eHealth Insurance Affiliate Program ($10-$75 per lead)
3. The American Automobile Association (AAA) Affiliate Program: ($.30 per click)
4. The Liberty Mutual Affiliate Program: ($3-$17 per lead)

The FlexOffers affiliate network also has a bunch of different options:

• My CoPay is Too High Affiliate Program
• Breeze | Affordable Disability Insurance Affiliate Program
• Trip Cover Affiliate Program
• Lemonade (US) Affiliate Program
• Mason Finance Affiliate Program
• Travel Insurance Saver Affiliate Program
• AardvarkInsure.com Affiliate Program
• Direct Asia Insurance Affiliate Program
• Insure the GAP Affiliate Program
• Allianz Pojistovna, A.s. – CZ Affiliate Program
• Premium Health Connections Affiliate Program
• Towergate Touring Caravan Insurance Affiliate Program
• Jet2 Insurance Affiliate Program
• Midcounties Co-operative Travel Insurance Affiliate Program
• Zelf NL Affiliate Program
• Pedalsure Affiliate Program

Niche Site Analysis

To get a sense of what insurance affiliates are doing to acquire and convert this traffic, I started Googling around and found a couple of different affiliate sites. One of the bigger ones I found that was wholly dedicated to insurance was US Insurance Agents.

You can see that the site ranks for over 110,000 organic keywords. That’s not a gigantic number, per se. Especially compared with some of the other niche sites I have examined, but this is a pretty competitive space, so these rankings are very solid.

Keyword Research

I extracted 1,000 of their top-performing organic keywords to get a sense of the content they rank for and the type of traffic they’re acquiring.

Content Themes

• You can see that they rank for the brand names of the insurance providers (“kemper insurance”),
• review keywords like “state auto insurance reviews”,
• and general information queries like “can i insure a car that is not in my name”.

If you are going to build a content site that acquires traffic passively, you’ll want to examine the industry’s keywords and figure out the type of content you want to create the rank for them.

As well, this keyword research will help inform your content creation efforts on platforms like YouTube.

Maybe you focus on a silo of ‘review’ content and a silo of content answering common industry questions like “how to check what vehicles are registered in my name”, which is a low difficulty keyword from the research table above.

I’ll discuss the importance of keyword research and content creation a bit more in the following sections.

Competitor Sites

I used Ahrefs to find their top organic competitors. In the table below, you can see 10 of US Insurance Agents’ top competitors.

Many of them are not wholly dedicated to insurance. For example, Reviews.com is a general review site that has a good deal with insurance information on it:

How They Get Traffic

According to SimilarWeb, the bulk of their traffic comes from search with a little bit of direct traffic as well.

This definitely makes sense- insurance is a very dry niche and there isn’t likely to be much social opportunity here.

Ads?

I used Ahrefs to dig up some ads that are running for the term insurance review. There were a lot of them- below you can see a screenshot of some examples:

When it comes to ads, you’ll want to make sure that you’re playing by the rules.

I’m not entirely sure what Google Ads’ policies are regarding insurance keywords, but that is something I would investigate before starting a campaign. It’s also important that you figure out how to do tracking properly and define conversion so that you aren’t flying blind.

I’ve seen a lot of sites run traffic to a ‘top 10’ type list (I’ve got a screenshot below of this type of landing page).

For example, bidding on the keyword “best health insurance” and pushing traffic to a page that rank orders the best options. I imagine the cost per click would be pretty high- so it would be a game of art and math to get the margins profitable.

How They Make Money

Interestingly, US Insurance Agents doesn’t seem to be running any ads on their website. Instead, they have a call to action banner across their site for a free insurance quote (#1) and an affiliate link to the website (#2). You can see both in the screenshot below:

Once you click that, you’re directed to a landing page with a variety of different Insurance programs (Geico, Progressive Insurance, Esurance, Pretected, Insured Nation, Rate Fetcher & Best Auto Insurance) you can get your free quote from. These are all obviously affiliate links:

What I Would Do

I would use GoDaddy to search out a brandable domain name. You can read my guide on selecting brandable domain names – I’d want something catchy and modern-looking.

Keyword Research

I would spend a lot of time doing keyword research to figure out the type of content to create that gets traffic.

Specifically, I would use Ahrefs or SEMrush to see what the top websites in the insurance niche are ranking for.

Content Styles

I would also examine the style of content that is ranking.

For example, the U.S. Insurance Agents website primarily ranks using user-generated content, i.e. all the user reviews:

A new website isn’t going to get a lot of user traction. So I would look through the keywords and begin creating long-form reviews of these different insurance agencies and insurance types, incorporating feedback from user reviews on other websites.

In addition, you can publish public information like support numbers, mailing addresses and other information people are searching for.

This helps make your page more usable, which should help with rankings. Many sites create handy knowledge boxes containing this information at the top of the page- this gives the content a premium feel.

I would also figure out a way to solicit user reviews.

I profiled Pissed Consumer– which does both knowledge boxes and user review solicitation really well.

You can build out custom forms and solicit user reviews on your website, even linking to them from social media. That way you can begin to curate a flow of user-generated content.

Monetization

In terms of monetization, I would wait until the site is getting at least 50 to 100 unique users a day before applying to an insurance affiliate program.

If you apply too soon before your site has significant traffic, you might not be approved or you might be removed from the affiliate program because you’re not sending any traffic.

I would use an affiliate link tracking plugin like Thirsty Affiliates to manage my affiliate links and even automatically link keywords across my sight to different insurance programs.

There are a lot of high cost-per-click keywords in this niche, so I would look to get into an ad network like AdSense once I had around 100 uniques a day.

Secondary Traffic Sources

I would also consider creating YouTube content. YouTube can be a powerful secondary or even primary traffic source I’ve been either direct linking to the Insurance affiliate program or pushing traffic back to your website.

Here’s an example of a popular car insurance video:

Summing Up

I think that this is a pretty competitive niche and Google might scrutinize sites competing in this vertical more strongly than in other niches- plus you need to be aware of lead provider regulatory issues.

I do think that with decent volume of traffic, you could see good ad revenue for these high CPC terms. I would want to examine the different affiliate programs to really understand how lucrative the payouts actually are.

As well, if you go into the ShareASale or CJ Affiliate networks, they do provide some performance metrics. That way you do have some insight into anticipated conversion capability.

Recently I’ve been binge-watching Kitchen Nightmares on YouTube. It’s one of my favorite shows.

Gordon Ramsay, the famous British chef, tours failing restaurants in the United States and the United Kingdom, and conducts a rapid-fire intervention with outrageous and hilarious results.

After every episode, I look up the restaurant online to see what happened to it- whether the restaurant was able to succeed or forced to close down.

I always encounter the same site in the search results- Reality TV Revisited:

The site, and others like it, provides updates about the restaurants featured in the show. It’s quite handy and I often end up going directly to the site and typing in the restaurant’s name for a quick update.

It gave me the idea for this next niche report. There are a variety of websites out there that provide episode guides for different TV shows.

I’ve written about the TV niche before, but in this niche report, I’m going to examine sites that focus on episode guides to see how they get traffic and make money.

Keyword Research

I used Ahrefs (you can do the same keyword research with SEMrush on a two-week free trial for my audience) to extract the top 1,000 ranking keywords for the Reality TV Revisited website:

You can see some common themes here.

This website really seems to specialize in restaurant reality television.

You can see that they rank for restaurant names “hot potato cafe”; update queries like “bar rescue updates”; restaurant names + show names like “sebastian’s kitchen nightmares”; and season/episode searches “hell’s kitchen season 18”.

There’s definitely a lot of organic keyword potential here. As well, the brand name of the restaurant gets traffic searches from people who watch the television show and also people who have never seen the show but are looking to eat there- so the traffic is somewhat twofold.

I also took a look at some of the site’s top-ranking keywords and filtered it down by the keyword “Ramsey” to show you how many micro searches there are for “Ramsey” terms.

Keep in mind, the site itself ranks for much larger terms but this serves to illustrate just how thirsty the organic search market is for good content here

Top Competitors

I used Ahrefs to find some of its top organic competitors. Below you can see six different sites that have significant organic keyword overlap.

There’s even a Blogspot website with nearly 33,000 organic keywords. That’s a definite indication of how weak the SERPs are.

The exact match domain kitchennightmaresupdates.com is pulling in a respectable 9,500 organic keywords with estimated traffic of nearly 56,000 visits a month:

What I would do

Niche Scope

I would spend some time determining the scope of my website.

For example, maybe you want to start a Bachelor fan blog. There’s definitely a lot of traffic for this show, but if the series ends and all of your content (and domain name) is related and restricted to the Bachelor, you might have painted yourself into a corner.

Maybe instead the focus of your site could be reality romance television and the Bachelor is a significant content silo.

In addition, you might want to provide more information than just episode guides.

It’s likely that when you entered into a TV niche like this you’ll find tremendous search volume for the actors’ names, their character names on the show, searches for their Instagram profile, who their spouses are, and a bunch of similar miscellany you can get traffic for.

Structure

When it comes to season and episode guides, you’ll also want to figure out a logical structure.

You might want to employ a directory theme with some built-in features to help organize your content.

Maybe you use WordPress Categories and Tags to organize seasons and episodes. For reference, Vulture.com has an attractive layout for their X-Files episode guides.

You can see the meta information box in the top right corner of this particular episode guide’s landing page. It lets you click through to the next episode and you can see it contains the actual name of the episode:

Wikipedia also has some detailed episode guides– but you can see they are structured very differently with all of the episodes published on to a single page with deep internal links.

There are different ways you can structure the site. I would suggest experimenting with this a little bit to see what produces the best results in terms of user engagement and organic traffic acquisition.

Keyword Research

I would use Ahrefs or SEMrush to examine the organic keyword rankings of different sites that are publishing these TV episode guides.

You’ll probably want to start publishing information on low difficulty / highly searched terms.

On the other hand, since this could be a passion project for you, you might want to start creating content on the shows that you like. It’ll probably be a lot more fun for you to do that.

Though, as always, you don’t want to neglect keyword research.

One interesting aspect here that I’ve noticed is that people will often look up the episode by a Season # Episode # search and/or by its true name. So your SEO would definitely need to optimize for that.

Landing Pages

I would also research the different types of landing pages sites are using.

I touched on this a bit before because it plays into your site structure, but you’ll want to figure out a template to use to give your site a consistent feel, positive user engagement, and maximum SEO benefit.

There are SEO benefits to producing long-form content on these different episodes, as opposed to doing what Wikipedia does and essentially republishing duplicate content, with each episode listed out on a single page.

That could work- I don’t know. The only way to tell is by publishing it and seeing how your site ends up ranking for all the terms.

What I Like

Fun Niche

This could definitely be a fun niche to enter.

People are passionate about these TV shows.

And nowadays even when a show ends they get a second life on streaming platforms including free ones like YouTube. Case in point, Kitchen Nightmares is as popular as ever even though it ended in 2014:

Low Competition / High Search

One of my favorite things to look for when entering into a blogging niche is seeing lots of low competition keywords with high search volumes. That’s definitely what you’ll see here.

What I don’t like

Limited monetization

There aren’t many affiliate opportunities in a niche like this. Sure you can try linking to the show on Amazon Prime Video- But the payouts are pretty minor (Source). You’ll have to make do with running ads on your site- which can be great, but will take some time to get going.

Content Costs

This one could go either way. You could easily rewrite existing content about the shows, but if you’re a devotee, higher-quality content will be expensive.

Mainly because someone might need to actually watch the episode to create insightful content about it.

You might want to check out Reddit. One of my favorite TV shows Animal Kingdom, for example, always has robust and interesting discussions on a dedicated subreddit after every single episode. It could be a great place to find writers and content inspiration when it comes to creating episode guides.

Summing Up

This can be a fun and lucrative niche. You likely will have to monetize with display ads. This can take a while to get going. But the advantage is that there’s a lot of search volume and not a lot of competition for these ‘non buyer’ type keywords.

If you are thinking about starting a book blog, I’m going to give you some practical advice and show you what the big sites are doing to succeed and make big money.

(For credibility’s sake: my portfolio of websites is making over $65,000 a month.)

A lot of the content out there demonstrating how to start a book blog run you through the remedial stuff like installing WordPress and choosing a hosting plan.

That stuff’s obvious- there are a million YouTube videos you can watch if that’s what you’re looking for.

I’m going to skip all that and dive into the nitty-gritty of how successful book blogs like Good Reads and Publisher’s Weekly get traffic and monetize that traffic for passive income profit.

Just check out some of these insane traffic and ranking stats for Good Reads:

Video Overview

Check out my video overview of the book blog niche:

Keyword Research

To give you an idea of what a successful book blog looks like I examined Good Reads’ keywords (what they rank for in the search engines):

You can see that they rank for a variety of different types of keywords.

1. They rank for book titles like “Ready Player One”;
2. Author names like “Stephen King”;
3. Literary genres like “erotica”;
4. Quote queries like “godfather quotes”;
5. and book recommendation queries like “best fantasy books”.

These are some of the primary themes.

Digging deeper, I filtered this keyword research by the query “Memoirs of a Geisha“. You can see that there are a variety of subtopics you can optimize your content for. These include searches related to quotes, PDFs, reviews, and ‘setting’:

Getting The Traffic

I used SimilarWeb to get a sense of where Good Reads traffic comes from. As you can see in the screenshot below, they get over half of their traffic from search, a third of their traffic from users who come directly to the website and the rest of the traffic is pretty marginal by comparison- but doubtless is pretty significant on its own.

A big brand like Good Reads will get a lot of direct traffic because it’s pretty famous and produces great content. If you’re starting your own book blog, getting this type of brand awareness takes an incredibly long amount of time and effort if it ever happens.

But if you get .001 of the traffic they get you’d be making several thousand dollars a month, just doing some back of the napkin math.

How They Make Money

Below, you can see a screenshot of Publishers Weekly’s review of Memoirs of a Geisha.

They have a modest write up reviewing the book surrounded by several ad units (2, 3, 4, 5) And affiliate call to action “Buy this book” and at the bottom of the post and Audible preview that is likely an affiliate link (6).

When it comes to running ads, generally the best-performing ads are those that are placed inside of the content.

So this is not even ideally optimized for advertising revenue. But, it’s a good example of a cleanly formatted website with quality content that is monetized by display advertising and affiliate links.

You don’t need to format your site to look exactly like this, you can get by with a simpler design to start as you get your druthers running a WordPress blog

What I Would Do

If I were trying to create a profitable book blog, I would focus on six things.  I would concentrate on keyword research, content quality, the site’s user experience, social, a publishing process, and monetization.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is vitally important. Most websites get the bulk of their traffic from organic search.

This means that You’ll want to optimize your content to be discovered by the search engines. If you take a look at the keyword research table, you can see a variety of keywords that Good Reads ranks for- Ahrefs also lists the keyword difficulty of each keyword.

The main idea is that you should target lower competition keywords with decent search volumes when you are starting your book blog.

I generally recommend writing 1,500+ words for each post. Google clearly prioritizes long-form content in the search engine results page.

2. Content Quality

If you’re trying to start a book blog, obviously you’ll want to produce high-quality content for your readership. Maybe you are doing the writing to start, but over time you’ll probably want to outsource some of the writing responsibilities.

Your readership is likely to have high-quality literary standards- though I should say that if you target really low competition keywords, you don’t always need to have an amazing quality writing to rank in Google search.

However, the quality of your content is an important variable that feeds into the next criteria I would focus on.

3. User Experience

Nowadays, search engines examine user experience to determine where you rank.

For example, if Google sees that people aren’t staying on your site for very long or they are pressing the back button and visiting an alternative website to get better information than what you provide, your site will not rank well.

You’ll want to give readers a reason to stay, which means the content should be good, it should be attractively formatted, the site should load reasonably fast. Make it a site that you yourself would want to read.

To get an idea of what a quality literary blog looks like, visit some of your favorites and see how they format their content. Try emulating some of their style early on- particularly if you are a novice internet marketer.

I would focus on producing long-form, high-quality, keyword-targeted content. Maybe I specialize in a genre of books like Mystery, Science Fiction, True Crime and profile authors and produce lengthy book reviews.

One of the smartest things you can do is create a mind map that will help you structure your site and plan the content creation process. Below, is a mind map that I created for the tennis niche. You can see how I brainstormed different content concepts.

Try doing this for your prospective book blog:

4. Social

While organic traffic typically comprises the primary traffic source for most websites, it’s also a good idea to experiment with social media.

If you’re trying to start a book blog, you might even be predominantly focused on social media traffic. One thing I would recommend, whenever you publish a new post on your website, consider converting it into social media content for all the major platforms.

You can use a tool like Stencil to quickly create graphics and publish them to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest. You can also authentically engage on social media platforms. I wrote a Twitter case study where I did 10 real Twitter comments a day for 30 days.

You can definitely drive traffic and build up an audience for a new site more quickly with social media than through organic search.

What I mean, it can take a long time for Google to feed your site traffic from its platform. That’s why if you focus on a social media channel you can definitely experience some quicker wins than waiting for the search engines to drip feed you some traffic.

5. Discover A Process

It might feel overwhelming when you first start your book blog.

However, the best thing I can advise is to create a process that you stick to. Maybe you write one book review a week and share it with customized graphics to all of the different social media platforms. On top of that, maybe you engage in conversations about the book on social media.

For example, if you do a review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you can search that keyword on Twitter and discuss the book there.

Fans of the late Hunter S. Thompson's cult classic, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," might not know that the book's memorable "Dr. Gonzo" was not a 300-pound Samoan attorney, but a wildly iconoclastic Mexican-American lawyer and activist. https://t.co/2lUHp7gHqJ via @NBCLatino pic.twitter.com/F96s1dY1mF

— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 24, 2018

Twitter is so rife with spam and bot traffic that when somebody actually engages authentically it’s pretty rare.

I know that whenever my content is retweeted or someone says something in reply to my Tweet, I get a notification on my phone and I always open up the app and check out who the user is.

You’re not confined to Twitter, either- you can go on Quora and Reddit as well. Whatever process you decide to use, give yourself a timeline and stick to it.

Maybe you set a goal for yourself of getting 50 visits a day for a week in a row by the end of 90 days.

6. Monetization

To make money with a book blog the two primary avenues will be affiliate marketing and display ads.

Affiliate marketing will get you quicker wins than display advertising because you’ll need a lot more traffic to see significant revenue from a display ad network like AdSense.

Since ad revenue is generally calculated on a CPM or cost per thousand impression basis, imagine your book blog gets you $10 CPM on the ads you’re running, you would need a thousand visitors a day to be making roughly $300 a month.

On the other hand, with affiliate marketing, you don’t need nearly as much traffic to generate that revenue.

For example, Amazon is currently providing a 4.5% commission rate on physical books and a range of different bounty payments for people purchasing an Audible book or sign up for a free or paid Audible plan.

If you’re able to get 100 people to buy one $10 book apiece, that would be $45 in commission.

I would recommend beginning with affiliate marketing and inserting Amazon or other bookseller affiliate links into your book reviews.

You can also begin collecting emails and marketing your book reviews to your subscriber list. Once you have some decent traffic- maybe around 250 visitors a day, I would consider running ads on the website.

AdSense even has an Auto Ads feature which will automatically integrate their ad units into your website.

Summing Up

I like this niche for several reasons. A book blog can be a fun passion project that generates you a decent income if you are committed to executing on it.

There are probably easier ways to make money online reviewing higher ticket items, but the advantage to a book blog is that presumably you are passionate about the topic. A lot of people who want to make money blogging don’t have the stamina or willpower to start sites they aren’t passionate about.

That’s why I generally advocate novice internet marketers begin blogging on content that interests and excites them while maintaining a practical approach to traffic acquisition.

Oftentimes people start blogs without understanding the basics of traffic acquisition. If you want to succeed online, it’s essential that you have a coherent strategy and process to both acquire traffic and monetize it.

When I first started building websites, I was obsessed with emulating what the pros were doing.

With good reason.

I had learned early on that I had zero design instinct. Some of my early websites were ghastly. I wish I had saved screenshots.

Utterly abysmal.

Which is why I imitated what better-looking authority sites were doing.

Right down to their color selections.

I remember using a Color Picker Chrome extension to get the exact hex codes of the colors other site owners were using on their cash green Calls To Action, the light-gray borders of their content boxes, even the rich shade of black on their H3 headers.

It should come as no surprise that there are some Color Picker websites out there with monstrous organic traffic rankings.

What’s The Site?

It’s HTMLColorCodes.com– a site that helps you “Get HTML color codes, Hex color codes, RGB and HSL values with our color picker, color chart and HTML color names.”

HTML Color Codes Ranks for 131,000 organic keywords and is pulling in an estimated 1.3 million organic visits a month:

Site Features

1. A color wheel lets you pick out colors on the fly
2. A color name page helps you find colors by their proper titles like ‘Salmon’ or ‘Indian Red’
3. A flat design color chart helps designers find “bold, bright colors are used to create clean, simple interfaces”

Keyword Research

I extracted 1,000 of the top-performing organic keywords- you can do the same keyword research with SEMRush (click for free 2-week trial) or pay for Ahrefs:

You can see that they rank for a variety of different types of terms.

Broadly speaking, they rank for things like “color picker”, “color codes”, “color hex codes”, but on a more granular level they are ranking for individual color code keywords like “black color code” and “white color code”:

Competitors

As you can see, the color-hex.com website is the only one of the bunch with more total keywords than HTML Color Codes:

However, HTML Color Codes is still the organic traffic leader with 1.3 million, almost doubling up it’s nearest competitor, as of August 2019.

How Does It Make Money?

They run ads on their content – you can see in the screenshot below a couple of ads above the fold. As you scroll down this particular page (https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/), you’ll see more ads in the sidebar:

According to SimilarWeb, they are getting about 2.7 million visits a month:

What I Would Do

Contact A Developer

I would first contact a developer to figure out how I could recreate the functionality of a web site like this within WordPress.

A site like this relies on the smooth functionality of the color selection tool generating color codes.

Keyword-Targeted Landing Pages

I would then consider publishing individual landing pages for particular color code queries like ‘gray color codes’.

This site doesn’t produce individual landing pages, but if I were starting a competitor site I would try to build out hyper-targeted landing pages to see if I could outrank them on the basis of content relevance.

I would do some rank tracking using SEMrush or Ahrefs To monitor my progress.

Link Building

I would consider using my Backlink Breakthrough strategy (or outreach services from DFY Links and Authority.Builders) to begin creating backlinks to the site.

Waiting Game

Organic traffic takes a long time to develop. Maybe I create 50 posts, try to get 25 high-quality backlinks, and then sit back and see how the site mature is over time.

What I Like

Gorgeous Design

The site is attractively designed. Which makes sense since its audience is probably comprised of designers and UX people.

Ease Of Use

The site is very easy to use. You can click on it color and instantly generate all of the different codes you need.

One thing that is sometimes overlooked when it comes to ranking a website is satisfying the users. The better engagement metrics you have the better your rankings will be.

Plus, the more useful your site is, the easier it will be to get high-quality backlinks.

Easy Keywords

There is a lot of long-tail traffic you can rank for here. While terms like ‘color picker’ are somewhat competitive, there are thousands and thousands of color keyword searches that are low competition.

What I Don’t Like

Development Costs

There aren’t any plug-and-play WordPress themes you can use to recreate the functionality of a website like this. It will require some development work to recreate what this site has done.

Not A Lot Of Content

The site doesn’t have many pages, either. It doesn’t create individual landing pages for each color.

Instead, they created a useful resource, got a lot of backlinks, and their relatively small amount of pages end up ranking for a lot of keywords even though they aren’t necessarily individually optimized for them.

If I were starting a site like this, my inclination would be to create landing pages for the individual colors.

Summing Up

This is yet another example of a site that ranks for truly unorthodox keywords.

However, unlike some of my recent niche reports, the site isn’t scraping and publishing thin content. On the contrary, it only has a few pages but a strong-back link profile and superior UI- a recipe for solid rankings.

There’s a board game cafe in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

Whenever I walk by late at night it’s packed full of Dungeons & Dragon types obsessing over make-believe worlds:

View this post on Instagram

Having one of the largest single day Age of Sigmar tournaments in the Tri-State Area #warhammer #ageofsigmar

A post shared by The Brooklyn Strategist (@thebrooklynstrategist) on Apr 6, 2019 at 10:17am PDT

I’ve never been into board games. I find them stultifyingly dull. Though I did love the card game, Uno…

Nevertheless, I can’t resist writing about this next niche because it’s so easy to rank. Even with automated and duplicate content.

I don’t even remember how I stumbled across the site, but I’ve been saving the URL in a Google Sheet for a niche report.

What’s The Site?

It’s a Scrabble word finder site called AllScrabbleWords.com.

If you’re unfamiliar with Scrabble, according to Britannica it’s a: “board-and-tile game in which two to four players compete in forming words with lettered tiles on a 225-square board; words spelled out by letters on the tiles interlock like words in a crossword puzzle. … Values of unused letters left to players are totalled and deducted from their scores.”

The site helps players construct words from the letters they’ve been dealt.

According to Ahrefs, the site ranks for nearly 600,000 organic keywords and it’s pulling in an estimated 1.1 million organic traffic visits a month:

Take a look at some of these crazy keyword rankings. One of their best performing types of keywords are “[number] letter words” searches. Evidently, there are a lot of Scrabble players using Google to help them compete:

Traffic & Earnings

According to SimilarWeb, the site is averaging over 12 million visits a month:

If you divide 12,630,000 by 1,000, you get 12,630, and you multiply that by a CPM ad rate of $10, the site would be earning $126,300 a month. That gives you a ballpark idea of what this Scrabble spinoff site is making.

Keyword Research

I extracted 1,000 of the top-performing organic keywords- you can do the same keyword research with SEMRush (click for free 2-week trial) or Ahrefs:

How It Works

On this 7 Letter Words landing page, you can see 3 ad units, numbered 1-3 below. Additionally, you can see they have a word uncrambler tool (4) that lets you input up to 12 letters and constructs words from them. They also have lists of words (5) That are related to the 7-letter word concept:

What I Would Do

Development Work

If I were entering into this niche, I would first figure out how I could replicate the functionality of All Scrabble Words.

I would speak to a couple of developers on UpWork and see what they think about designing something for WordPress that can scramble and unscramble words.

I’d also want to see how I could publish lists five-letter words, for example, using a shortcode. Once I had the development work done, I’d begin churning out some content. I probably go slow at first.

For example, if you’re able to push out hundreds of pages for different word lengths or letter combinations, I’d resist the temptation to flood Google’s index with this thin content.

Keywords & Content

I would consider choosing 25 keywords to target, creating landing pages for them, and then also including some unique content from a service like Hire Writers.

That way, the site starts off with a solid, unique content foundation. I would use a keyword research tool to do some rank tracking- Ahrefs or SEMrush, for example.

I would also have some standalone, informational content- really long-form blog posts about playing Scrabble.

For example, strategies and tips- this way the site has even more unique content on it, helping to immunize it against potential Google search penalties.

Link Building

I would make sure I am tracking my primary keywords and once I had 25 pages published, I would consider using my Backlink Breakthrough link building strategy (or outreach services from DFY Links and Authority.Builders) to begin creating backlinks to the site.

What I like

Easy rankings

As you can see in the keyword research table, there’s a lot of search volume for these Scrabble word searches. And there’s not much competition.

Easy Content

The content is pretty easy to create here- most of the landing pages are lists of unscrambled words.

What I don’t like

Thin Content

A site like this is going to be pretty thin on content. Once you figure out how to curate words by length and perhaps by some other filters, you’re going to end up with some relatively thin landing pages.

Getting Backlinks

It might be a little challenging to get backlinks. You can always outsource links to services like DFY Links and Authority Builders, or use my Backlink Breakthrough strategy, but if all you have is landing pages of Scrabble words, it might be a tough sell to other site owners.

Development

I searched around a bit to find WordPress plugins that are capable or designed to scramble or unscramble words and didn’t find any. You’ll probably want to hire a developer to figure this out for you. It shouldn’t be that hard to do, but it’s something you’ll want to consider before entering into this niche.

Summing Up

This is yet another illustration of a website that cleverly curates large amounts of duplicate and thin content while maintaining massive organic rankings. It would be a fun project to try out. As I’ve noted, though, you will need to do some development work to figure out how best to create these different letter lists.

Has a business ever made you blind with fury?

Maybe you were deceptively billed.

Maybe they refused you a refund.

Or perhaps their wireless coverage is just iffy:

Nowadays when consumers get angry, many resort to the internet to channel their rage anonymously.

The website I’m profiling today warehouses that anger, slaps some AdSense ads on it, and is making an absolute killing.

What’s The Site?

The website is PissedConsumer.com and it ranks for nearly 1 million keywords:

How It Makes Money

You can see some sample ad placements on the screenshot below for their Meaningful Beauty page. Numbers 1 + 2, for example:

Number 3 showcases a handy knowledge box that aggregates reviewer information while also soliciting review submissions from customers.

The site thrives on user-generated content. As you scroll down the page, it has infinite load enabled so that more and more reviews load as you scroll down the page.

This helps to increase the page load speed, only serving user reviews when the reader nears the bottom of the page.

The more reviews the site gets, the more keywords it ranks for, the more traffic it gets and the more ads it can serve.

How Much Does It Make?

According to SimilarWeb, Pissed Consumer is averaging 1.72 million visits over the past six months.

The average visit duration at just under 2 minutes with the average pages per visit at 2.06.

If you wanted to calculate the monthly ad revenue, you could divide 1.72 Million by 1,000 (1,720), multiply that by 2.06 (3,543), and then multiply that by an estimated CPM like $10.

That would come to $35,432. It’s a ballpark number. But the site has been around for a long time- and has probably cracked a million dollars in earnings over its lifetime.

Keyword Research

I used Ahrefs (you can also use SEMrush to do the same research- click the link to access a 2-week free trial just for my readers) to extract their top 1,000 organic keywords:

Content themes

Pissed Consumer ranks for several distinct types of keywords if you evaluate the keyword research table above.

They will rank for:

1. brand terms like “carefree dental”;
2. customer service queries like “radiant revive phone number”;
3. lawsuit searches like “clear choice lawsuit”;
4. complaint and scam searches like “national american miss scam”,
5. and common ‘review’ type searches like “xstrands review”.

Pissed Consumer Competitors

Ahrefs Also provided a handy overview of Pissed Consumer’s top organic competitors.

The biggest of the bunch is the Better Business Bureau, followed up by Crunchbase, Trustpilot and Consumer Affairs.

What I would do

If I were entering into this niche, obviously I couldn’t expect user-generated content right off the bat…

Keyword Research

What I would do to start is focus on keyword research. I would use Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze the organic keyword rankings of a site like Pissed Consumer, or one in the competitor’s comparison table, and begin picking off some of the best opportunities to create content for.

User-Generated Content Tech

I would also research user submission plugins / WordPress directory themes and figure out how I could begin soliciting user reviews of companies and translating that into structured data much the same way Pissed Consumer does.

Maybe a plugin like User Submitted Posts could be adapted to this purpose.

Solicit Reviews

You could also hire a virtual assistant or a Twitter bot to solicit company reviews.

Maybe you can search out customers on social media and send them a link to a form where they could provide a review on your website for free.

Or maybe offer an incentive like entry into a raffle for an iPad.

If you look on Twitter, for example, a lot of people have some harsh criticism for My Pillow:

Alright Twitter peeps. I’m a pillow diva and still searching for the one.

Anyone (side sleepers especially) have any recommendations?

(If you’re going to reply with MyPillow, please don’t bother. It’s my current pillow and it sucks)

— Adam (@JohnnyNuck) June 25, 2019

Here’s the tea, I met the mypillow guy one time and he was a complete dick, his pillows suck too so idk y y’all hyped him up so much

— Madison Neeley (@mmneeley14) July 19, 2019

This is not a political statement. My husband bought me a MyPillow last year. It sucks. It was a waste of money. I put it on the floor for my cats to use. They don't. https://t.co/GuYW3Klpzc

— Stacy Wescoe (@morestacy) April 4, 2018

I would have writers create content about the companies- you’ll need some on-page text to get the ball rolling with user-generated content.

You could write a couple hundred words about the company, Wikipedia-style. You could also rewrite existing customer complaints to increase the word count. I would play around with different word count lengths.

Maybe aiming for a thousand words apiece to start. As a first pass, I’d try to get 50 posts published within three months or so, monitoring the organic keyword positions with Ahrefs or SEMrush.

I would supplement the content with some guest post outreach which can be outsourced to services like DFY Links or Authority Builders. Once you have some content and some links, traffic will be a matter of time and luck.

What I Like

User-Generated Content

A site like this thrives on user-generated content.

Disgruntled consumers flock to the internet to express their outrage and Pissed Consumer capitalizes on their often incoherent wrath.

Awesome On-Page Experience

Pissed Consumer also does an awesome job with on-page user engagement and on-page SEO.

Each of these company complaint landing pages is thoughtfully designed and helpfully aggregates useful information near the top of the page in their company knowledge box.

Is able to compile a significant amount of information about companies.

In the screenshot I provided for Meaningful Beauty, you can see aggregated user reviews, number of issues that have been resolved, the total number of reviews, the claimed losses, and even customer support contact information.

What I Don’t Like

User-Generated Content Issues

As with any user-generated content, you are going to get a lot of weird and crazy submissions. Check this user review of Nordstrom out – a ‘pissed consumer’ wishes death on the brand:

I would be concerned about legal liabilities. What if you end up getting sued by a company like Nordstrom’s for hosting defamatory content? I’m not an expert in these matters but it feels really dicey.

In addition, because so much of the site’s content is user-generated, you’re going to rank for some weird keywords.

For example, their 5th best keyword, as of July 2019, is ‘swinger zone central’ an adult ‘swinger’ website:

I’ve seen this phenomenon occur over and over especially with scraper sites.

They end up ranking for the least difficult keywords and many of them are keywords no one would ever think, or want, to optimize for.

It’s another downside to a site like this- user-generated content means that you don’t really control the type of traffic you get.

Ad Eligibility?

It’s difficult enough nowadays to get into ad networks like AdSense, but sites like these that rely on scraped information and user-generated content can be more difficult to get approved.

Summing Up

I like how uncompetitive the keywords are in this niche, but I’d be wary of warehousing so many negative, potentially defamatory, company reviews on my website.

As you can imagine, the people most motivated to review a company on a website like this are those who feel they have been wronged by the business.

Perhaps you can balance it out by soliciting positive reviews, as well- employing a Twitter bot to automatically solicit feedback.

How’s this for a niche: death?

Talk about unsexy…

I generally embrace boring and weird niches, but this next niche goes a bit too far, even for me.

Not that I wouldn’t love to own this particular website and its absolutely insane rankings, but this is probably the most morbid niche I’ve come across.

And keep in mind I’ve already profiled Prison SEO…

What’s The Website?

The website is FindAGrave.com- a directory style website for ‘final disposition information’, i.e. cemeteries.

According to their About page, “Find A Grave is the best place on the internet to look for burial and other final disposition information for your family, friends and famous people. The site provides tools that let people from all over the world work together, share information and build an online, virtual cemetery experience.”

You can see some of their stunning traffic stats below- 5.4 million ranking keywords:

Keyword Research

To get a sense of what it’s all about- check out some keyword research I did below, analyzing their top 1,000 organic keywords:

Content Themes

This site ranks for several different types of keywords.

Looking at keyword data, they rank for different cemeteries (“greenwood cemetery”); their own significantly searched brand term (Find A Grave); and somewhat well-known people that have died (“Rainey Bethea”).

How Does It Make Money?

Find A Grave appears to be completely monetized by ads.

According to their FAQ page, they don’t charge any money if you want to leave ‘flowers’ on their digital memorial pages.

You can see some of their ad placements on this Jim Morrison memorial page. Number 5 appears to be a sponsored ad placement from Ancestry.com:

How Much Does It Make?

I used SimilarWeb to analyze the site’s overall traffic statistics. According to them, they are averaging about 15.5 million a visit a month with users accessing an astonishing 20 pages per visit.

To get an estimate of site earnings, you could divide 15.5 million by 1,000, multiply it by the pages per visit and then multiply that number by an estimated CPM ad figure like $10.

That number comes out to $3.1 million. I highly doubt that they are making that much- maybe the pages per visit number isn’t accurate.

Nonetheless, this is definitely a high traffic website that probably does have significant page views per user.

The Big Idea

Find A Grave focuses on an incredibly unsexy but highly searched topic: death.

There’s a massive amount of traffic to be had in this niche.

While this particular niche might feel somewhat distasteful, the general idea here is that there is far less competition in these unsexy niches.

What I Would Do

If I were entering into this niche, I would do a lot of keyword research to identify content themes.

I already identified several content themes for Find A Grave above.

I might emulate those to build-out different silos of content on my website.

For example, it would make sense to do lengthy write-ups on different cemeteries around the world.

You could create visitor guides, for example. These guides would help people plan their visit to a particular cemetery.

I would also search social media to find images I could embed of the particular cemetery to enrich my posts- like this Tweet about Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn:

Conducted a EVP and Flashlight session today at Lillie's grave in Greenwood Cemetery. pic.twitter.com/6F3WUIa5RC

— Anomalous Investigations (@ParanormalEast) July 14, 2019

While Find A Grave monetizes with ads, there are some affiliate opportunities in this niche as well.

Funeral Affiliate Programs

As I build out my content, I would research the different affiliate programs in the funeral niche to see how I could integrate those offers into my website.

A quick Google search for funeral affiliate programs turned up the website Funeral Call, which provides “live funeral home answering service with over 28 years of experience in the industry. All of your calls are answered by a live, highly trained professional.”

And Funeral Wise provides a funeral planning tool- another interesting monetization option.

Of course, I would be sure to vest these difference funeral service providers to make sure they are of high quality. I wouldn’t feel comfortable referring grieving people to low-quality solutions.

The advantage to an affiliate program, especially for new sites with little traffic, is that you can see some earnings even if you have negligible traffic.

You’ll need a lot more traffic to even get into an ad network, let alone see he’s into earnings from ads running on your website.

Site Planning

So, in a nutshell, my approach would be to find different content themes and build out these blog post verticals over time.

You can mindmap these themes as I did in my Get Started guide for tennis below:

Say you choose two different content themes to start, you can plan ten posts in each vertical and use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush to track keyword rankings as your site matures.

Maybe one vertical of content outperforms the other- then you can pivot to that content vertical to ensure efficient use of your time and money.

Advantages

There are some pros and cons to this style of site.

User-Generated Content

Now that they are a recognized brand, lots of people flock to the site- you can see evidence of that in the keyword research table. There’s tremendous search volume for variations of the term ‘Find A Grave’.

In addition, a lot of the content is completely user-generated.

People are able to upload images and other content to the website chronicling different gravestones from around the world.

It’s definitely difficult to gain traction with user-generated content- you need a lot of site visitors and probably a team of virtual assistants or employees to manually review submissions.

Low Competition

As I’ve already observed, this is a low competition niche. There are lots of keywords that are easy to rank for here.

Ad Revenue

Funerals are really expensive. I would bet that funeral advertisers are competitively bidding for traffic on sites like Find A Grave. This might translate to solid CPM rates.

Disadvantages

Morbid

Obviously, this is pretty morbid. If your site succeeds, you might be spending a lot of time thinking about gravestones and cemeteries.

While the ad revenue would be a nice consolation, you might not want to be involved with a morbid topic like this.

Hard To Replicate

A lot of development dollars have gone into this website- it’s a genuinely helpful and interesting resource. (I’d experiment using a WordPress directory theme to replicate the style of Find A Grave.)

If you’re trying to replicate their strategy, it won’t be so easy right off the bat. As I already mentioned, they have a lot of user-generated content – people submitting unique images to the website, for example.

Early on I would focus on building out high-quality content and over time perhaps adding more interesting features to the website, maybe incorporating user-generated content, in some way or another, once I had more traffic.

Summing Up

This is another weird niche site opportunity.

There are definitely affiliate and ad opportunities here combined with low competition keywords a new site wouldn’t have too much trouble ranking for.

I would think long and hard about starting a site in this category- it could become depressing writing about cemeteries and the deceased.