Self Employed or Bust

Case Analysis - Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniping Technique

August 1, 2008 – 7:00 am

Last week I introduced Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniping Technique and highly recommended you check out everything on his blog at Court’s Internet Marketing School. In case I didn’t make my point then, this is somebody whose work and business model I highly respect.

I’ve also mentioned that I’ve setup a few sniper sites and, though very young, wanted to give you my first impressions of the process and the early results. Before we get going on that, I want to throw out a few points.

First, if you’ve read his introduction to keyword sniping, you’ll see Court recommends 200+ searches and less than 1,000,000 competing pages (based on keyword). He also recommends a certain CPC average and PR rankings for the top 4 competitors. None of that will make sense to you if you haven’t read his stuff. Again, go read it. I’ll be here when you’re done.

I modified those recommendations in an effort to test out some of his theories to avoid winding up in Google’s sandbox from the get go. For example, he mentions a pretty quick potential for page 1 ranking using his methods. In order to speed things up even further, I gave myself a little flexibility on the searches (100 or better rather than 200) was VERY conservative on competition (100K or less to dodge the sandbox) and didn’t care much at all about the CPC averages as long as they were over $0.50.

Court also recommends avoiding putting up ads right away. I abstained for the first two weeks but put ads up on week 3 (from which point I started counting profits so the blogs are actually 1.5 months old but have only been monetized for 1 month).

Ok, so there are the rough statistics. Remember, the objective of keyword sniping differs in a very fundamental way from what you may or may not know as niche blogging. In niche blogging, you are setting up a targeted blog (much like with sniping but maybe not quite as targeted) but it is a blog to which you are constantly adding content. Keyword sniping takes a different approach. It requires some upfront labor but then you pretty much leave it alone. Every 6 months you come around and spend an hour or so to refresh things a little and then walk away again.

As I’ve stated before, my idea of a great business is one that continues earning money whether you’re there working on it or not. While any established blog can essentially fit this category, you will inevitably begin to lose readers of a “real” or “niche” blog if you stay away for too long and don’t continue building content. With a sniper site, you don’t really care about that. You aren’t banking on a loyal and returning readership. You are banking on upfront labor followed by virtual indifference which trickles money in steadily. If you’re asking how less money is a good thing, consider the next paragraph.

Another benefit to keyword sniping is that you can setup up 4, 5, 10, 20 of these things, pouring yourself into the effort up front, then walk away and let the cash roll in. Again, less long term labor allows you to create more of these to compensate for the smaller earnings from each. That said, Court mentions having earned $3500 in one month from one of his snipes. That’s nothing to sneeze at in my book.

Let’s talk a little about what you need to get started with keyword sniping.

1.      A computer with internet access and a web browser. You don’t even need to own your computer but you’ll need semi-regular access to one early on for your initial blog creation, posts and link building efforts and occasional access to freshen the sites up and keep them alive.

2.      Writing skills – If you aren’t a “good” writer, don’t fear. An “ok” writer can do just fine providing you proofread your work and research your material. You will have to invest a little more of yourself into the effort but if it pays, isn’t that worthwhile? It also wouldn’t hurt to run your work by somebody who you feel does have a talent for writing just to contend with grammatical issues. And for God’s sake, use spell check.

3.      A keyword specific domain name and hosting. Your sniper blog will need a domain name which you can purchase for under $10. You will also need your blog hosted. Mind you, you can pay for hosting (and Court walks you through how to do this with both written and video instructions) or you can get hosted for free through blogger.com.

4.      Wordpress – this is your blogging software. Good news. It’s free. You won’t need Wordpress if you create your site on Blogger but remember you won’t ever be able to sell your Blogger site if it does well and you decide you want to unload it for hard cash.

5.      Your targeted keywords which Court explains how to pick.

6.      Time and motivation. How much of either depends on your writing ability and how much you like watching money trickle in for indefinite periods of time.

If you can meet the above criteria, you can set up a sniping blog. So how are my sniping sites doing after a being alive and monetized for a month?

One year ago my wife and I setup a couple websites with no idea what we were doing. About 6 months ago I also created a couple here’s-what-I-think-about-stuff blogs just to see if I’d enjoy blogging. So, between two websites and two blogs (which I’ll admit I did virtually no promoting, marketing or link building for) I earned less than $40 from Adsense in 1 year.

Using Court’s sniping methods, I have earned almost that amount in the first month. That will grow. Mind you, I’m targeting low paying topics with less searches than he recommends. In other words, my sniping sites aren’t setup as well as they should be (by a long shot). I’ve also not made as big an effort to get links coming in as he requires in that’s absolutely essential. I also didn’t write 10 posts as he recommended for each. I only wrote 5 for each (though I’ve added 1 to each of them recently).

In other words, half-assing Court’s methods, I’m already earning more than the “real” blogs and websites I’ve put up with 1/100^th the effort. The earnings will only grow as more traffic rolls in. They will grow as I make more efforts to get inbound links. They will grow as I gradually add enough for 10 full posts on each site. They will grow substantially as I create more lucrative sniper sites based around better CPCs and other starting conditions.

And the real kicker is that 3 of the 4 sniper sites I created are already number 1 on page one on Google for the full keyword I was targeting. The fourth is on page 8 and climbing. I consider that proof of concept.

So, after 1 month the verdict remains encouraged and positive. You are missing out on a fantastic opportunity if you don’t at least go to Court’s Internet Marketing page and read everything you can on keyword sniping. If after visiting you decide the method isn’t for you, that’s fine. But to not even look could leave you missing out on a method of self employment that might be lucrative, fun and right up your alley.

Next steps: Create a couple sniper sites following Court’s directions explicitly and targeting higher payout keywords. I expect it will take them longer to rank on page one but I also expect much better income when they do. I won’t revisit this topic for a couple months so that these sniper blogs (and new ones I’ll be creating) have some time to develop further at which point I’ll offer up a new status update.

Stumble it!