Yesterday I wrote a fairly detailed post about the basics of keyword sniping.   In the past I’ve also touched a bit on keyword sniping in a few of my posts, as well as pointed you to an excellent resource of keyword sniping over at CourtneyTuttle.com.

For those unfamiliar with the term keyword sniping, this is the process of using tools such as Micro Niche Finder to locate under represented keywords and creating a website to fill this void.  If done properly and monetized correctly, you can take a little traffic and convert it into a lot of income.

What I wanted to touch on today is the mindset you need to have when attempting to snipe a keyword because it is quite a bit different from the mindset needed as a blogger or as a domainer.

As a blogger you probably have many goals, including developing a reader base, increasing your subscriber count, and growing your brand and authority within your niche. Domainers have a slightly different mindset, as there focus is primarily on finding domains that are brandable and have strong keyword combinations so that they hold resale value (or receive enough natural traffic to monetize directly).

In order to complete a successful keyword snipe, it is important to take a completely different approach to creating your website. The first thing you’ll want to do is throw out everything you have learned as a blogger. The only parallel is that you are after search engine traffic. Gone are the days where you care about feed subscribers or readership. You’ll be writing 10-20 posts when you launch the blog, then probably nothing after that (though I’ve found it best to add one or two posts a month if possible). Not only do you not care about subscribers, you actually don’t want your content to be relevant. The goal as a keyword sniper is to generate search engine traffic to your blog, then have them not find what they are looking for. This simply means that your content needs to be relevant to the search engines, but not to readers. If people come to your site and find what they are looking for, they won’t click anything.  If people come to your site looking for something specific and don’t find it, they will either hit the back button on their browser, or click on an advertisement/affiliate link. You want a large percentage of them to click the advertisement/affiliate link.

If you go into keyword sniping with this mindset and a lot of patience, you should find some success.  As long as your CTR is above 3%, you’re doing things right and will just need to work on increasing traffic.   To do this, you’ll just need to periodically research and adjust site keywords to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.   If your site isn’t at 3% CTR or higher after a year, then you’ll either want to make some changes to your setup or not renew your domain and go after a new keyword.

Any questions? Let me know in the comments below!