Guaranteed Profitable Niches

Step 1 – Discovery Phase

Go to Flippa.com… then click on the “Just Sold” tab:


The “Just Sold” area of Flippa is a GOLDMINE!
Here you can find hundreds (more often than not, thousands) of sites that have switched hands recently.
At this point, you can start going through the listings (by skimming the auction titles), OR you can sort and narrow your list down a bit using the “Refine” function, or more specifically the “Revenue” links under the Refine menu:


As you can see, there are several options… and the selection I use depends a bit on what type of sites I’m looking to build. For most micro niche sites, I look at sites that are in the $100 – $500 month range.
You could use the “Advanced” function to really narrow down your results, but most times you won’t need to.
Let’s click on the “Over $100″ to see what we find:


On the first page I found a site in the nutritional niche (at the time I’m writing this). If it’s something that intrigues me, I will click on the link and visit the site to see if it is a simple design that can be easily duplicated (in this case, it is):


So, let’s move on to the next step…

Step 2 – Deconstruction

Now that we’ve found a potentially suitable site, we want to “deconstruct” the site.
By simply looking at the site, you can see that this is a relatively “ordinary” MFA site (MFA = Made for Adsense) and that it is a pure HTML site (by looking at the page source… plus the author of this site states the site is “pure html” in the listing).
First thing you want to take a quick look at are the Flippa stats and the description of the auction listing. There you will find that:
This site had earned over $200 in August (of 2011), has 53 inbound links and  that the site is relatively young (built in July 2010).
It also sold for $2500 , so if you can build a similar site you can stand to earn that (or maybe more) if you choose to flip it.
The next thing I do is go to SEMRush.com, enter the URL of the site you found on Flippa, and hit “search”:

While SEMRush offers a paid service, we can use their free search to find most of what we need.

SEMRush will give you some pretty cool data that you can copy into your notepad or Excel worksheet (as you start building your keyword list). I’ve pointed out some of the areas you want to pay attention to from these search results:

As you can see, the keyword “how to become a nutritionist” is getting over 40% of the traffic for this site… so you “may” want to dig into that one during your keyword research to see how hard it would be to rank for (we already know that the site only has 53 inbound links, so it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to knock it off it’s perch).
Great, it gave us FIVE keywords… what about the rest?
Well, that’s actually very simple… just go to the Google External Keyword Tool and enter the site URL into the “Website” field (I recommend you login to your Google account, if not setup a free Google account if you haven’t already it’s worth it):

This screen may look different if you are not logged in to your Google Adwords account

Once you hit “search”, you will be presented with a nice list of keywords from this site:

Now that you have this data, compare it with your SEMRush results, organize the keywords into categories by looking at the category / article listing on the site: www.HowToBecomeANutritionist.org
Then you’re off to the next stage of research (if you choose to), which is the competition and ranking analysis. In other words, finding out who your competitors are in Google for your keywords and what it would take to bump them off the top spot(s) in Google.
For smaller niche sites, I do this only for my top 3 – 5 keywords (that I deem suitable as my primary keywords).
Then I move on to domain name selection and setting up the site.
This is my simple 2-step formula for finding “guaranteed” profitable niches. This should literally take 5 – 15 minutes, in which time you should be able to dig up a few (or several) potential candidates.