The Online Income Club

I thought I would talk about this today as it has cropped up a few times over the last week in various conversations with customers.

It’s about misspellings.

Now a few years ago there were a number of “products” that targeted Ebay and others by finding product listings that had misspellings and so could get overlooked by buyers. This meant lower competition and an opportunity to buy things cheaper.

This idea seems to have been adopted by some of the internet marketing community and has been used to target misspellings of the Google searches (who doesn’t spell things wrong sometimes?).

An example would be someone looking for a “satellite tv”. Now that keyword gets 27,00 exact searches a month and a CPC of $9.80. Pretty good by any measure. However the competition will be very stiff indeed.

So it’s not a huge stretch to think that people may well misspell that when searching (I used this as an example as I accidentally bought  a misspelled “satellite” domain once).

Following the correct keyword research process I can see that that “satelite tv” actually has 1,900 exact local searches and a CPC of $8.97 and looks considerably easier to rank for than the correct spelling. On the surface this is looking good and to be fair a couple of years back it may even have worked.

However it has one BIG flaw. Google now automatically correct spellings of search terms and list the results for the correct spelling. So even if you mange to get a number 1 raking for the incorrect spelling, no-one will ever find it.

Similarly if you try a  domain name and get it ranked it will never be seen as the misspelled keyword search results will never be displayed.

So in case you have been considering this, or come across a forum post saying this is a good idea, or see website for sale with a misspelled domain name, PLEASE heed my warning and stay away from trying to make money from misspellings.

Curiously, did you know that “misspell” is one of the top 100 misspelled words in the English language?  – Go figure.

If that saves one person wasting their day then  this post will have been worth the time. Enjoy and speak again soon.

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