Following on from yesterday’s notions on accruing additional start-up capital, I took time earlier to research a few ideas for celebrity type sites. In doing so, I used several free online tools and, half way through, it occurred to me that my methods of research would make a good blog entry and potentially be useful for others.
Mercifully for those around me, I, ordinarily, take little interest in the lives of celebrities. My knowledge of the modern day celebrity is very cursory and general, and my reading on the topic is confined to the covers of the trash magazines that line the semi-aisle of the supermarket checkout. So, my knowledge of Britney Spears does not extend far beyond the National Enquirer headline pronouncing she mothered Jim Morrision’s illegitimate quadruplets and was last seen being served chilled sangrias on a Venusian beach, by Hitler and Lord Lucan.
However, on occasion an expertly Photoshop’d face does stand out amid the surrounding sea of jokish headlines and Twix wrappers and that (and that alone!) afforded a starting point. I wrote down the names of the few celebrities I was able to recall and used them as my starting point.
I ended up with one female sporting celebrity, one actress-cum-model, one actor, a poet and two major news celebrities.
The relative search volume figures for the sites looked quite promising. Using the estimation tools at SEO Book, the projected monthly search volume for each of the site ideas are given thus:
- Actor site: 11 000 searches. per month
- Actress site: 352 000 searches per month
- Female sporting celebrity: 800 000 searches per month
- Poet: 2 000 searches per month
- News celebrity #1: 150 000 searches per month
- News celebrity #2: 50 000 searches per month
Although these are estimates, at this stage I see no reason not to place some trust in their accuracy. For a search term of 800 000 searches per month, hitting the first page of the SE results should qualify the site for at least ~ 1000 SE referrals per month which, at an approximate AdSense CTR of about 2%, should generate around 20 clicks per month (not considering traffic from other sources.)
The Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool estimates a cost of between $0.50 and $0.80 per click. So, provided my logic is not too skewed, the 20 clicks should bank $5 or more per month (provided Google pay the reputed 30-40% of the click cost value.)
Of course, there are numerous assumptions in the above but it seems a reasonable endeavour in order to accumulate a little capital in the short term. The AdSense return on organic SE traffic is nice, but selling the sites once the traffic has been established would be a little more lucrative. More to follow on this.
[...] addition to the proxies, I adjudged the celebrity sites I’d been researching and mentioned in a previous were worth pursuing and went on to register a further six .info domains at a cost of $17.94. This [...]