I have been buying, ranking and flipping websites for a number of years now and I have found a formula that has worked time and time again.
In this guide, I will teach you the exact formula and how you can replicate my success. It is an absolute monster and one that I know you’re going to love.
Note: AuthorityMetrics (mentioned below) is no longer operational, however, there are tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush that will allow you to find keywords and their difficulty.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve built and sold several sites that use list articles (aka “listicles”) as the primary content format, and its still a format I use profitably to this day.
While I can’t disclose the actual URLs of the sites I sold out of respect for the buyers, the sites were similar to this one publicly listed on Flippa.
Smashinglists.com was doing $3k a month and sold for $40,000 – likely underpriced due to the seller having their Adsense account banned.
List sites are fun to build and the model for building an “infotainment” list site is very different than the traditional niche site model you might be used to seeing.
Instead of targeting low volume but highly commercial keywords with buyer intent, you’ll be targeting high volume, non-commercial keywords that other SEOs aren’t really going after.
Instead of building a site as an SEO-Affiliate Marketer, we’ll be building a site as an SEO-Publisher.
Even if you don’t end up building an infotainment list site like the one we’ll see below, I hope you’ll find some valuable takeaways that will help you build better sites!
This Is Not The Traditional Niche Site Model
The infotainment site model looks very different than the traditional niche site strategy which usually involves:
- Finding a small set of commercial keywords w/ low competition
- Buying a partial match domain name
- Building a handful of 500-1000 word articles around related longtails.
While those sites can certainly be very profitable, they’re basically an arbitrage play between Google and Adsense/Affiliate offers. Its the classic SEO-Affiliate Marketer approach to building websites which is under constant attack from Google.
On the other hand, the SEO-Publisher approach (or SEO-Publisher-Affiliate Marketer) is a long-term model that can not only survive in today’s SEO environment but still has the potential to thrive going forward.
List sites are an easy way to start building sites from an SEO-publisher perspective, which requires a mindset change if you’re used to building traditional niche sites.
Because of my personal fascination with SEO, the list site model I’m sharing with you today still relies heavily on Google.
However, by taking the SEO-Publisher approach, you do have the opportunity to use other channels like social media to gain traction and grow your list site – something that’s virtually impossible with the traditional SEO-Affiliate Marketer approach.
What You Will Learn In This Guide
- Step by step processes to find low competition keywords for your list articles
- How I got over 100,000 Facebook likes on a $30 list article
- How to do perfect on-page optimization for your list articles, while still keeping your articles engaging for the reader
- How to structure your list site
- My easy to follow linkbuilding strategy for ranking list sites
Our Strategy
Before we dive into the tactical details, let’s take a quick look at what we’re trying to accomplish.
This guide will show you how to build a list site with a broad range of informative, yet entertaining articles – think a mini Listverse.com.
Ultimately, we want this site to:
1) Drive a ton of SEO traffic
2) Earn revenue via Google Adsense
3) Encourage social sharing
Our traffic generation strategy will lean heavily on SEO. The key to our SEO strategy will be laser targeted keyword research focusing on high volume, low competition informational keywords. We will make sure these are supported by lots of closely related long tail keywords.
Our on-page SEO will be extremely well optimized, but not at the expense of readability. We will carefully choose our titles to incorporate the right keywords.
We’ll mix in a lot of relevant long tails within the content to ensure we get traffic – even if we don’t rank for our primary keywords.
Our content will consist 100% of list articles. List articles have some inherent advantages over your typical SEO article. I discuss some of these benefits in this SEO content creation guide.
For off-page SEO, you can choose your preferred method of grayhat/whitehat linkbuilding – whether it’s via PBNs, guest posting, outreach – or a combination of all of the above.
What About Social Media?
Some of the fastest growing list sites on the internet rely heavily on their social media dominance.
Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Distractify etc. all make frequent use of the list article (alongside other “viral-bait”) to drive hundreds of millions of page views per month.
Cracked.com is an old-school player that is exceptional for creating interesting, hilarious list articles that get a ton of social shares.
But this guide isn’t about creating articles that are engineered to go viral, or creating exceptionally funny or compelling content. We’re creating list-style articles optimized primarily for SEO.
They will get social shares as a side effect, but that’s not our main goal.
Of course, there’s also tremendous value in pursuing social media as its own traffic channel independent from Google, but we’re not going to touch on that in this guide.
Niche Selection & Keyword Research
What Kind Of Keywords Are We Looking For?
We want keywords that can be easily targeted with interesting, list style articles that would appeal to the average web browser who is just looking to kill some time.
They also need to be high volume keywords with low to moderate competition and lots of related long tails. The stiffer the competition, the higher volume and more long tails we need to make it worth targeting.
For each set of keywords, we generally want 1-2 primary keywords, and between 2-5 long tail keywords.
So how do we find these keywords?
Reverse Engineering Top List Sites For Keywords
Most people start their keyword research in the Google Keyword Planner, but in this case, starting here actually illustrates a common problem with this approach to keyword research.
How do you even begin to generate ideas for great list articles in the Google Keyword Planner? Where would you even start?
Fortunately, there’s a better approach. We’re simply going to find successful list sites that dominate search rankings and we’re going to:
1) Find out what keywords they’re ranking for
2) Analyze the difficulty of those keywords
3) Find out which of those keywords we can rank for
4) Use those keywords as the blueprint to kickstart our own list site
The more sites in your market you can run through the process we described above, the more low competition, but potentially profitable keyword groups you’ll find.
Here are 5 list sites I was able to find with a cursory Google search.
- listverse.com
- list25.com
- ranker.com
- oddee.com
- toptenz.net
In this walkthrough, we’re only going to analyze the first 2 of the 5 big list sites we’ve identified.
If you wanted to build your own list site, just analyzing 2 big sites in your niche should be enough to get started,
However, the bigger you can make your plot of pay dirt, the more likely you are to find the golden nuggets.
The Process
When I originally built-out my list sites, I used a combination of SEMrush (with a coupon code)+ another keyword tools that could bulk analyze keyword difficulty.
This let me pull in keywords that big sites were ranking for and also bulk analyze difficulty.
A lot of popular keyword tools (dating back to the old Market Samurai days) do a great job of giving you data to analyze a SERP individually, but without bulk keyword difficulty data, how can you quickly analyze a large batch of 1000s of keywords to figure out which ones are the low hanging fruit?
Getting the data to build out my sites was a pretty painful process. There was a lot of merging spreadsheets, importing and exporting, and then recalculating metrics.
To solve that pain point, myself and my partner Han built a keyword tool that will let you type in any competing website and not only pull up the keywords they’re ranking for, but also find out how competitive the SERP is for each keyword.
We can take a couple of the big list sites, run them through the tool, and see if there are any keywords with healthy search volumes and low competition we can target.
With one click of a button, we pulled 3,889 keywords that our 2 list sites are already ranking for, along with all of the metrics we need to quickly sift for golden nuggets.
Filtering For Golden Nuggets
If you’re mining for gold, you want to sift through as much paydirt as you can. Even if most of what you sift through is just rocks and bottle caps, the more you have to work with, the more likely you are to find gold.
As SEOs, this means using automated processes to collect data on as many relevant keywords as possible.
Now that we a large list of keywords that are driving traffic to 2 of the top list sites on the web, we need to filter through our keyword list to find the nuggets that we can rank for.
Because AuthorityMetrics has retrieved a Difficulty Score for every keyword (calculated by analyzing Moz metrics and on-page relevance for the top 10 for each keyword), we can simply use the filters in AuthorityMetrics to identify potential nuggets i.e. keywords that have a good balance of high volume/low competition.
After applying our filters, we’ve identified nearly 800 keywords we can potentially use to kickstart our list site. You can see a dozen of those keywords in the screenshot above.
Out of this list of a dozen keywords, let’s take a quick look at the keywords and see if there are any nuggets.
Selecting Our Keywords
The next step of the process is to identify keywords we can add to our “shortlist”.
Once we have a nice shortlist of keywords, we can dive deeper into each individual keyword to find related longtails and decide which groups of keywords we want to include in our initial launch.
But first, we’ll take a closer look at some of the keywords we’ve identified.
1. No Trespassing Signs
Volume: 6,600 Difficulty: 3.51
This keyword has decent search volume and high buyer intent, but this buyer intent actually means that the searcher is looking for a website that sells signs.
A little search in Google shows us that this keyword got caught up in our net because of an article called 25 Brutally Honest No Trespassing Signs on List 25.com. While List25.com isn’t in the top 10 here, it is in the top 20.
We could potentially target keywords that have higher buyer intent and count on the searcher clicking on an Adsense ad to find what they’re looking for.
But when I’m launching a new list site I like to make sure the searcher’s intent is as aligned with the content I’m providing as possible.
Also, it looks like Google heavily favors e-commerce sites in this SERP, so it might be harder to rank with a list article than it appears at first glance.
2. Plastic Surgery Gone Wrong
Volume 22,000 Difficulty: 4.29
This keyword is perfect for an interesting list article.
A list article showing different cases of plastic surgery gone wrong is exactly what the searcher is looking for.
Even though most searchers won’t have buying intent, you could get higher than usual rPMs from Adsense since plastic surgery is such a lucrative niche.
The keyword has very high volume, which we like. But while the difficulty score of 4.29 is still under our threshold, this SERP is filled with authority sites that are also highly relevant to our query.
While the keyword isn’t something we’ll rank for quickly with a new site, there are likely a ton of relevant longtails we can identify in the next step, and it’s a perfect shareable topic for the type of site we’re building, so we can go ahead and add it to our short list.
It’s worth noting that if you have a decent volume keyword with moderate difficulty (let’s say 8000+ search volume, difficulty score between 4.5-5.5), you’re very unlikely to rank for it with a young site using the list site model.
However, it can still be worth creating an article targeting that keyword, if you have other lower competition long tails related to that keyword you could rank for.
You don’t have to rank for every primary keyword you target, at least not right away.
As you’ll see when we go over our linkbuilding strategy, we’ll be building a “flywheel” of authority we can use to rank for increasingly competitive keywords.
The fact that this keyword gets so many searches means its interesting to a lot of people, and you should still be able to drive traffic to the list through long tails, internal click-throughs, and social media.
Added to the shortlist.
3. How To Become Famous
Volume: 22,000 Difficulty 3.95
This keyword’s difficulty score seems to be skewed downwards by some of the lower competition results in the bottom half of the page, but the competition at the top means this keyword isn’t really the type of low hanging fruit we’re looking for early on.
I will add it to the shortlist, just so we can see if it brings up any interesting long tails.
4. Private Security Contractors
Volume: 1,600 Difficulty: 3.85