In January this year I started researching keywords with high search volume and high earnings per click. I wrote a tool that extracts data from Google AdWords Tool and Traffic Estimator. I built intelligence into it that spotted high earning keywords, retrieved more suggestions and recursed in that fashion.

I then looked at at the resulting high earning keywords and analyzed the search results for each keyword or phrase. What I was interested in was finding a space where the earning potential was high, the search volume was high but the top ranking website or websites were of poor quality and innovation had stopped.

I found it in the Nutrition and Weight Loss space. The top ranking site is low quality and is owned by a media empire, meaning they’ve stopped innovating. Paydirt!

I grabbed a huge pile of government nutrition data and developed a large nutrition website. I employed someone to add a high quality meta-data to the site that made it more useful and attractive.

To make the site truly competitive, I added a viral model that tied into SEO. The viral hook is not a “Facebook Like” button or other gimmick. It’s a full blown application that other websites install, providing the site with valuable backlinks and increased marketing and distribution.

I launched the site in late January. Three months later it had enough credibility with the search engines to start getting traffic and the SE traffic took a nice jump.

Thankfully the site survived the Panda Google update and has continued to grow. In the last week it’s taken another healthy jump in traffic.

Here are the current stats:

• The site currently gets over 700 visits a day from a vertical audience interested purely in nutrition.
• Over 500 visits per day are from search engines.
• SEO traffic is rising.
• 50% of traffic is North America i.e. USA and Canada.
• Hosting costs are $20 per month on Linode and costs will remain low because the site is well engineered and optimized.
• Yahoo Site Explorer lists the site as having 5,377 backlinks from external sites.
• Site currently has 350,000 pages of content indexed by Google with more crawled daily.
• Site has over 7,000 photos that were hand added by my staff.
• It has several features in the space it’s in that are unique and useful.
• It provides a needed and genuinely useful public service that is unique in the nutrition space.
• The site is barely 6 months old so it has a ton of growth potential.