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Picking a profitable blog niche that is of personal interest can be a difficult process, not to mention that you’ll have to single out a niche amongst an almost infinite number of unique topics.
Not all blog niches are inherently profitable because the topic you choose, often determines the future size and profitability of your blog to some extent.
It is important to pick a niche that you have genuinely interest in because the natural passion you have for the topic sustains the content creation process and will actually make the whole chore of blogging enjoyable.
In this post, I’ll outline some of the methods you can use to select an appropriate blog niche that is not only potentially profitable but challenging and relevant to your interests.
Characteristics of the Ideal Blog Niche
Here’s a list of the factors which I personally think, constitute the ideal blog niche:
- Personal interest in topics within the niche. You enjoy reading, learning and writing about these blog topics.
- Networking foundation. You are already active in several networking groups or forums within the niche.
- Moderate to high search volume. The blog niche has a moderate to high search volume, meaning that people actually do search for more information on the topic.
- Potential for Monetization. Ideally, you’ll want a blog niche that actually serves up relevant contextual ads or has a range of affiliate programs which are at least partially relevant to your audience’s needs.
My method of choosing a niche is surprisingly straightforward and the research process is very easy to perform. You should be able to pick a suitable niche in an hour or much lesser, by using the simple three step method that I’ve outlined below.
Step #1: Narrow your Interests
This is the logical place to start because blogging about something you have a natural interest for is personally enriching. What I usually do is to pick a few general topics I’m interested in and put them through a couple of websites and tools.
Recommended Tool: Wikipedia.
You can use search engines to perform niche research but I particularly like using Wikipedia to narrow down my focus in a specific field because articles in Wikipedia are very well interlinked and are generally informative.
For example, see this Wikipedia page on surfing. In the first paragraph itself, there are links to several topics related to surfing, such as surf boards, wind surfing and big wave surfing.
Scroll down to the end of the page and you’ll see even more subsections like surf culture, surf music and surfing competitions.
Wikipedia can also be used as an informational tool which gives you more background on any topic. thereby allowing you to eventually decide if it is something you want to pursue.
You should end up with a short list of niches you want to target, which leads you to the next step.
Step #2: Assess the Traffic Potential for the Niche
To assess the size and potential of a niche involves discovering the number of people who actually search for information on the given topic.
This is important because you don’t want to be pursuing a niche that is inherently limited by its weak organic search traffic.
Now is not the time to target your actual keywords so you don’t need to always go for the high volume search terms. As long as the overall search volume is moderate, that should be fine.
Recommended Tool: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
I like using this tool because of several reasons: It provides suggested monthly regional search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN and churns out direct links to Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Google trends, all of which are other tools you can use.
After typing your keyword (e.g. surfing) into the search box, you should focus on the vertical length of the results instead of the actual search volume for the keyword.
The length of the list determines how deep you can go with this specific topic and also how many keywords you can effectively target for traffic. This is an important point: Never focus exclusively on the main niche keyword but the overall search depth for the niche topic.
Once you have found a suitable niche with a moderate search volume, you’ll need to run a quick check on its monetization and profit potential.
Step #3: Determine the Monetization and Profit potential for your Niche
This step is fairly simple. There are two ways to monetize any new blog: One is advertising networks (e.g. Google Adsense, Auction Ads) and the other method is the use of relevant affiliate programs from websites. Let’s split this section up into two.
Recommended Tools for ad networks:
Google Adwords Traffic Estimator and Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.
These are currently two tools which can provide a rough estimate for the profitability of a niche. While the results are limited to Google Adwords/Adsense, I think they are reliable indicators of the niche’s general potential.
Here’s what you’ll see from Google Adwords Traffic Estimator after I did some basic keyword searches:
While other information such as the estimated cost and clicks per day are included, you’ll only need to focus on the figures in the estimated average CPC column.
Generally, the higher the Cost per Click amount, the more the advertiser has to pay and hence its possible that you’ll earn more by creating content which reflects that specific keyword.
On the other hand, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool gives you a lot of keyword suggestions, each with their search volume or average CPC. You’ll just have to type in one main keyword and the tool will generate a list of results.
For example, here is an example of some results when I type in ‘web hosting‘.
This basically gives you an estimate of the monetary value of all the longtail keywords you will be naturally targeting when you are writing in depth on a topic.
A word of caution: Don’t just go for the keywords with the top CPC averages because these are usually targeted by many other webmasters as well. Generally, if your niche has a Adwords CPC average of $2-3, it should be profitable while allowing a low barrier of entry for new websites.
Recommended Tool for affiliate programs: Search engines + Affiliate networks
The easiest way to find affiliate programs for your niche is to do a google search for your niche keyword + “affiliate program“. You’ll usually be able to tell at once if there are adequate programs available.
In any case, there are also a large number of affiliate networks such as Commission Junction, Shareasale and Click Bank so there shouldn’t be any difficulties in finding affiliate programs for most niches.
Seven Day Niche Blog Challenge: Update #2
So far everything is going well. I enjoy setting up new blogs, even though the process can be repetitive. I’ve largely followed the three steps that I’ve mentioned above while picking my niches, although I did perform some alternative research to develop a more rounded social media outlook on the niche.
Here are two additional tips, both of which I personally use in addition to the three steps I’ve listed above.
Additional Tip #1: Use Community Specific Searches for Buzz Value
The method emphasizes on performing site-specific searches on various social websites and forums to assess the overall popularity of the term.
I’m going to focus on quite a bit of social media marketing alongside the usual search optimization so its very helpful for me to know the popularity and traffic value of a specific term within the social community in question.
For example Fan Forum is the largest online celebrity forum on the internet. If I wanted to promote my content on the forum, I need to know if the sub-niche or topic is widely mentioned and hence attractive to the forum users.
Here’s an example of what I would do if I were performing research on the topic of Lindsay Lohan.
Open a new browser window and go to google.com. After which, type in the following command:
site:fanforum.com lindsay lohan
Which would bring me to this search results page with a list of the number of times Lindsay Lohan, or the niche topic is mentioned. According to Google, there are 1,410 results for this term on fanforum.com alone.
On the other hand if you were to do a similar search for Chuck Norris, you’ll only come up with 3 search result terms. This just means that Lindsay is hot in Fan Forum and unfortunately, Chuck is not.
To get the same information on other websites, you’ll just have to replace fanforum.com with the url of the site you want to explore in detail.
Additional Tip #2: Use SearchSpy tools for Out-of-Box Research
If you absolutely can’t think of any interests or are far too lazy to do any research at all, fear not for there is still a solution. Some search engines often have a spy page which allows you to see what people are searching for in real time.
Dogpile’s SearchSpy tool is one tool that I recommend. Basically all you’ll need to do is to sit back and passively view the stream of searches that show up on the screen. When you see one that interests you, middle click on it to open it in a new tab. After you feel that you’ve opened enough tabs. Click off the spy page and then sort through the results.
This is a an excellent way to think out of the box and I’ve come up with some valuable niche topics with this method. It’s also a more relaxing way to go about the process of selecting a blog niche.
I usually run Dogpile for a few minutes at the end of the day to see if I encounter something worth researching in detail.
It is important to note that search spy sites do not offer package solutions, I’ll still recommend that you run some of the niches that you’ve found through the three steps I’ve listed above.
More on Niche Blogging to come..
The weekend’s here but I’ll try to put up some more short tips on niche blogging when I have the time. The next article will lightly touch on the domain name selection process and hopefully I’ll be able to provide a blog setup checklist all of you can use.
If all this has been rather new to you, I recommend reading my introduction to niche blogging, which will provide some background information on niche blogs and how they can help you to make money online.
Steve Rubel theorises on the rise of blog advertising in his post "As Portal Inventory Dwindles, Will Ads on Blogs Rise" . He makes a good point - with portal inventory booked for months ahead surely it's time for some big bucks ad dollars to find their way into the cream of the blogosphere. Certainly, Steve points to some tantalising evidence on TechWeb that "Advertising executives see blogs, podcasts and web-enabled cellular phones as newcomers in the market that are worth watching, but have yet to prove they're worth as major investments, a survey released Tuesday showed."My heart tells me that blog advertising maybe approaching an important cross roads, going from an unruly teenager if you like, to a fully paid up adult of media society. But my head tells me that the cross roads is being called too early, as is alluded to in the "worth watching, but yet to prove worth" bit of the above statement. Almost in paralell to some of my statements about where "blogging in general currently sits" in my post The Wider Implications of Business Blog Survey my belief is that blog advertising proper has some growing up to do on a number of fronts.I'm not being a stick in the mud for saying this - it's what I think is an objective assessment, based on recent experiences in the advertising agency environment. However, what I ultimately believe this boils down to is a question of time and acceptance into the mainstream. How long will that take is an interesting question? I think we have already seen tentative toes dipped into the water and that will probably be the form for another six months to year. In terms of when we might see consistent multi million dollar ad inventory commitments I think we're potentially looking at 18 months - 2 years. But who really knows!
Ads On Blogs discussed Pay Per Call Advertising some months ago, which was a technology being developed by America Online along with other partners including Ingenio and backed by eBay and Microsoft - to transform ad clicks into a direct telephone call.It now seems Google has taken the bull by the horns and done a limited release to some parts of the USA of a very similar technology. Who said Google was innovative? Google explain how it works:"Here’s how it works: When you click the phone icon, you can enter your phone number. Once you click ‘Connect For Free,’ Google calls the number you provided. When you pick up, you hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the other party. Then, chat away on our dime." (For full details)Expect to see this appearing on blogs sometime soon!
Blog advertising seems to be taking some more tottering steps towards hitting the main stream with this positive write up in the New York Timesabout the Up Your Budget treasure hunt campaign. The throng of advertisers now willing to chance their arm within the world of blogs seems to be growing and for interesting reasons. As Scott Deaver executive vice president of Budget (a car hire company) says "I've got to be smart and make my brand feel smart to the consumer. I can't just out spend Hertz," Mr. Deaver added, "but I can outsmart them."For me this speaks volumes for how innovation is often born out of adversity, and that may well be the driving force behind the growing flirtation with blog advertising.Also something that was of great interest in the New York Times article was how certain blogs were selected for advertising the Up Your Budget campaign. Jay Arnold, president and chief executive at the Impax Marketing Group in Philadelphia who coordinated the Budget marketing strategy outlined the process:"With the help of a consultant, B. L. Ochman, using criteria like how frequently a blog is updated and how interesting they are to the so-called technorati. In fact, Mr. Arnold said, the tracking service technorati.comwas used to help pick the blogs."Whilst I think Technorati is an excellent tool on a number of fronts, it is a little hard for me to accept that it will continue to be a benchmark for selecting blogs in future ad campaigns. What is really needed is a comprehensive database of blog traffic statistics. I suspect that this need will become more acute as every week passes.
I recently wrote on Performancing about giving some consideration to your blog business exit strategy. My post was spawned from an excellent piece of journalism on Business Week titled Googling For Gold which basically looks at the phenomenon of starting niche tech businesses with the intention of selling out to Google 12 months later. It was while reading this post that I spotted a particularly intriguing paragraph:"Google is creating a whole new ecosystem for entrepreneurs, says Baris Karadogan of U.S. Venture Partners, a high-tech VC firm in Silicon Valley. Karadogan says he's closely watching a group of entrepreneurs who are designing a highly specialized online advertising tool, hoping to sell it to Google for $50 million. "Before," he laments, "you needed a VC. Now you can build a Linux-based data system for $100,000 and survive long enough to sell without ever raising a venture round."Umm, which company is running a beta version of a "highly specialized online advertising tool" at the moment? Is it just me, or am I seeing a Google future for Chitika!
Fascinating post on New York Times which adds further credence to the slow march of blogs into the periphery of mainstream media.Here are some of the key points:Bloggers who started out for fun are now finding that they have full blown businesses on their hands.More and more companies are considering post product placement on blogs.It's important to be honest about advertising on your blog.However, in the words of Anita Campbell quoted on NYT "I also don't apologize for accepting advertising, and I make it clear that just like everyone else I have to earn a living and pay the expenses of keeping the site going." couldn't agree more with this sentiment.It's becoming apparent that more businesses are noticing the influence of blogs and have spent an estimated $50 million to $100 million this year on blog advertising and marketing according toForrester ResearchInterestingly US Web an online marketing firm has paid people $5 to mention a company or link to it's site. Examples includeLussori.com and Terra Entertainment who offered MySpaces users a mention on film credits if they included a trailer in their personal profile pages.A Forrester Research survey found in February that 64 percent of US national marketers are interested in advertising on blogs.
A dark revenge tale about Las Vegas middle school science teacher (Robinson) whose beloved wife (Elizabeth) witnesses an execution in the desert and is then targeted for death by the mobster who committed it, notorious Vegas crime lord Jimmy Dolan. Dolan’s vast wealth stems from his human trafficking operations. Dolan succeeds in having Elizabeth killed before she can testify against him. Without a witness to the murders, Dolan goes free, and Robinson must avenge Elizabeth’s death on his own.SCREENSHOTS
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After the events of “Ice Age: The Meltdown”, life begins to change for Manny and his friends: Scrat is still on the hunt to hold onto his beloved acorn, while finding a possible romance in a female sabre-toothed squirrel named Scratte. Manny and Ellie, having since become an item, are expecting a baby, which leaves Manny anxious to ensure that everything is perfect for when his baby arrives. Diego is fed up with being treated like a house-cat and ponders the notion that he is becoming too laid-back. Sid begins to wish for a family of his own, and so steals some dinosaur eggs which leads to Sid ending up in a strange underground world where his herd must rescue him, while dodging dinosaurs and facing danger left and right, and meeting up with a one-eyed weasel known as Buck who hunts dinosaurs intently.
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Do you Blog for Money or Readers?
Labels: HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE, INTERNET MARKETING REVIEWS, MAKE MONEY BLOGGINGOne of my new online friends Heather at Home with Heather was commenting in a recent post that she was thinking of dropping adsense from her blog as it wasn't producing anything meaningful for her. Heather is not alone as I know a number of bloggers who feel the same way. What these folks have in common is that they all produce top quality reader friendly blogs. This unfortunately is a death blow for adsense income.
Adsense works if you derive most of your traffic from the search engines. It doesn't work if you attract a loyal readership. Readers read - they come to your blog because they like your content. They may leave a comment and possibly follow links you have mentioned - what they don't do is click on ads or adsense. For the most part they don't even notice the irrelevant parts of your site once they have been back enough times. They know where your content lies and get straight to it.
Search engine traffic produces mostly first time visitors who are looking for something in particular or are just out sunday driving. If they find something of value on your blog you may gain a new reader. If they don't find what they want there is a decent chance they will click an ad or follow the adsense trail. Most, of course hit the back button and continue on their merry way.
I bring this up because we all need to ask ourselves what type of visitor are we after? Do I want readers or browsers?
When I started this blog I structured it like my my niche sites. This was not so much a conscious decision but rather an old habit. My niche sites have 1 purpose - to make money. To make money they have to produce adsense clicks and sell affiliate products. I have found a pretty successful way of doing this and without thinking about it I set this blog up the same way. It worked well for the first 6 months and then something strange happened - readers started showing up. Comments were left. People started asking questions. I suddenly had to concern myself with writing for an audience. Cool I thought.
Once I started writing as if someone might actually read my stuff I found that I could no longer experiment with adsense bait or affiliate links. The result is that while my readership has grown my income has decreased drastically. In the past I wrote articles on popular ebooks, products or the latest fad designed to attract beginners. These topics could draw a decent traffic flow from the serp's and every so often I would rank well for a winner and my adsense revenue would take off. Project Payday and Roadmap to Riches are two of my most productive keywords - they still bring in 100 plus visitors a day to this blog, visitors who do the most adsense clicking. I could slap affiliate links into my posts and know that there would be some sales.
The problem now is that I am finding it hard to experiment or "play around" with this blog as I don't want to turn off my readers. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that I have readers. I've never had any before and this is my first taste of belonging to the "community". The thing is, and you need to define this as well, what is your purpose in blogging? Do you want to be an A-list blogger? Do you want to make money? If you want to be the former then it will be hard to do the latter.
Hey, hold on there. John Chow is an A-list member and he makes lots of money. True or so he claims and I don't dispute this. The point is that he makes money selling his name. He can command money for paid reviews and advertising because he is well known and has a large readership. People pay him to get mentioned by him. Everyone and their dog pastes a link to him on their blog hoping he will acknowledge them in return. The problem is that until you become an A-lister you will not be able to make money like they do. In the meantime you can't do the things that will make you money because you wont become an A-lister if you do.
There is what, maybe a dozen people at the top and a few up and comers that might make it but after that there are millions of blogs that wont. This isn't a slight on anybody - just a numbers thing. There isn't room for a Thousand A-listers, there will always be a handful that crawl on top of the pile and reduce everyone else to B-list status. It's just the way it works.
I don't spend much time reading the A-listers - I can't remember the last time I learned anything from them that made me a dime. Really, reading about who they know and what conference they just attended doesn't make me money. I have never read a paid review - have you? Did you go to the reviewed site and spend money? (Have you paid for a review? What were the results?) I've never clicked an ad on their blogs. Sure there is lots of info available on what the IM community is doing but this doesn't make me money either. Getting visitors that click and buy is what makes money. Posting a link to John Chow doesn't get me these types of visitors. I have said this before - if your audience is Internet marketers then you will starve. IM'ers don't buy and if they do they use their own link. They don't click ads and they don't click adsense.
I got involved in this niche because it allows a blogger to increase pagerank easier than any other niche I know of. Try and get a thousand backlinks for "Ugg Boots" or "Fish Recipes". Try and get 1 high PR link. Hard to do. Niche marketers don't handout links. IM'ers do and I wanted a high PR blog so that I could use it for all sorts of things.
What am I getting at?
I guess this is my way of apologizing in advance to my readers, I want to start making money again and thought I would warn you to ignore some of the stuff you see in future - my experiments to come as it were. Or you can try it yourself. I don't want to be an A-lister, not my style and quite frankly I have always liked making money anonymously. There is less work and you can try a lot of stuff and get away with it as long as you are under the radar.
This doesn't mean I don't value my readers, I do. I just don't want to bore you to death writing about the same topics as everyone else does in the IM community. It bores me actually. And it doesn't make me money. That said if you notice some strange things on here just chalk it up to an experiment. Some will work and some will not but it keeps me interested and hopefully I can pass on what I learn to you.
A pre-amble to Making Money with Adsense
There is no doubt that Google has created a dominant search engine and the brains behind the funny name deserve credit. But it could be said that the blackhatters deserve a lot of credit as well. Without the blackhatters Google would never have developed into the engine that it has become.
Relevance is everything when it comes to search engines. When someone asks a question your results had better be relevant or no one will use your service. Next - you have to be able to provide the relevant information in order of "most" relevant to "least" relevant. Users will leave never to return if you keep giving them articles that mention their keyword in passing. Users want exact information and search engines have to provide it. Google is the best at doing this, hands down.
Google's strength and it's weakness is the pagerank system. By counting links pointing to a site, assessing the relevancy of the links and then the authority of the links Google is able to decide which site is the most relevant for any given keyword. In practice this system is fairly reliable when dealing with small/medium sites in niches with low to no advertising. There is little incentive to game the system in these niches. The accuracy of pagerank begins to breakdown as you get into niches that have a lot of advertising dollars to go around. If a person can make money doing something then there is immediate incentive to maximize ones earnings. In some cases this can be done by legitimate means and in some cases not. One could argue that the moment anyone does anything to maximize earnings - legitimate or otherwise - that the person has just gamed the system.
By using PR Google created a successful system for ranking pages on it's index. They also laid out the game plan for creating a successful site in the process. To get high rankings in the serp's you need backlinks. You now need to meet other factors as well but PR is still a major asset to have in order to climb the serp's. By this very fact Google created the Black-hatters.
From the moment PR was introduced Black-hatters have been manipulating it in order to make money online. Adsense income has always been a favorite target for them as it is easy to earn and at one point, early on, it was incredibly profitable.
The Golden Age of Adsense
In the beginning all you needed to rank well in Google was to have the most backlinks. A few quick thinkers realized that the quickest way to do this was to create thousands of sites and send a link from each over to your adsense site with the "consolidated student loan" ads plastered on it. These guys had the field to themselves and made a lot of money. Eventually greed and competition took over and woke Google up. Suddenly all the popular searches were ranking really crappy irrelevant sites and Google had a problem.
To fix this Google devises PR and gives more weight to older sites with higher PR.
The black-hatters changed stride and created thousands of sites to send backlinks to hundreds of other sites who's new PR ranking was then used to send hundreds of links to the adsense sites and the money kept rolling in. No problem. Google what else ya got?
Google replied - Links must be from relevant sites. No problem. The black-hatters just created thousands of spammy relevant keyword stuffed sites. The game was back on.
Google pulling out it's hair countered with relevant anchor text and only 1 vote per C-class IP. Ah ha... take that.
"Child's play" said the black-hatter revving up his comment spam generator, "I can have a thousand links by noon".
Fortunately for Google site owners came to their rescue on this one and deleted the spam and started using captchas and filter programs. Who knew people actually hated spam?
For the first time black-hatters realized they were up against more than just Google. The citizenry was catching on and getting tired of their tricks.
The path to accessing free usable links has now become narrow indeed. Some hearty souls are still fishing for them with the aid of trackback spamming software. At the moment most blogs that allow trackbacks don't have the no-follow tag on them. This will change but it's the reason there are so many scraping sites online sending trackbacks. The black-hatters are taking advantage of the trackback weakness and have resorted to snippet scraping to put Google in a bind.
Google has a problem. While the official word is that duplicate content is a no no and will be penalized the reality is that this has been hard to put into practice.
Who are the biggest scraper sites? The "news and Information services" are. How many newspapers pull the same story off of the wire services? Where does CNN and it's cohorts get their news? All the media giants have huge scrapper sites and their posts are all over the place. So is Google going to call the "New York Times" a spammer?
Nope and this is why scraper sites are so prevalent now. If the major news outlets can list story snippets linking back to the source then why can't everybody. Why isn't my small site allowed to post snippets of information the same way? The answer is you are. Google has no way of knowing if you are legitimately providing your readers with useful info or if you are just a spam site scraping content.
This practice will continue until the community comes to Googles aid again and adds the no-follow to trackbacks.
Most black-hatters have taken a different approach. The days of a free lunch with adsense is over but there is still money to be made. Enough in fact to cause them to bite the bullet and just buy links. This is Google's Achilles heel.
As long as Google relies on backlinks to rank PR they can be manipulated by people willing to simply pay high PR sites for a link. The recent crackdown on paid links has not stopped this practice - it has simply pushed it underground. Visit the Link sales page on Digital Point and you can see what a booming business this is. The people who were buying the ads and reviews with textlinkads and PPP were black-hatters buying your PR. Google's latest slap was to put a stop to that - they weren't trying to take away a source of income from people - they just wanted you to use the no-follow tag. By using the no-follow you would eliminate the black-hats and be left with buyers who really want to place an ad on your site or have you review them. We will see how many legitimate buyers there really are - I'm guessing not so many.
Another thing the black-hat community has done is set up and join Blog networks. These are set up by purchasing expired domains that still have PR. You can join these networks and gain access to hundreds of real blogs with existing PR and post your own content on them. This allows you to send highly optimized anchor text links to your main sites. Gaming the system - you bet.
Google has not met this problem yet and faces a challenge in trying to eliminate it. They can't do away with pagerank as they need a way to rank relevancy. Pagerank depends on links and links can be bought without a trail. They can't insist that all links be no-followed or their system will fail - they need do follow links in order to rank pages.
How Google will handle this is anyones guess but I suspect that the days of site wide links are numbered. Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine just how relevant content links embedded in articles are and now place the most weight on these links. This doesn't negate paid links it just causes people to do more work for them. From Google's point of view site wide links that do-follow can be paid links although blogrolls usually aren't. It's doubtful that penalties will be handed out for these type of links but it's assured that they won't have much weight in the future and will probably be eliminated. If you want to send PR to a friend it's best to do it in a relevant article - relevant to both sites that is.
This brings us up to date as far as the Goggle/Black-hatter tug of war goes but I just want to touch on the effect this history has had on Adsense.
There may still be people who are making outrageous sums of money with it but no where near as many people or as much money as two years ago. Most serious Adsense sites can still make a good dollar but you need a small army of them to approach large earnings. In my case I have been able to cut down on the number of blogs needed by creating blogs that are multi-niche relevant and can target more keywords from the same blog.
The good news is that there are a lot less serious players in the game now. Sure you see the ads all over the net but in reality only a very small amount of sites really know what they are doing and actively pursue Adsense. Most of you just slapped it somewhere on your site and wonder why it doesn't make you more than a few cents a day - if that.
Those that have pursued Adsense have learned to use Google's rules to their advantage. Give Google exactly what they want and they respond by giving you high listings in the search results. The decrease in competition has meant that there are less people vying for the high paying keywords and what's more it's a fairer fight as everybody has to play by the same rules. To rank well you can't just have the most relevant high PR links. You also have to have the most relevant content and not just on one page but your whole site has to show relevancy. LSI has allowed people who can provide relevant useful content to out rank the people who have deep pockets and buy links. There are a lot of low PR sites dominating popular keyword listings - something that didn't happen in the past. You still need links but not as many if your content rocks. Just look at wikipedia.
I have written this post to highlight the fact that Adsense is wide open to those who want to pursue it. It is more accessible to everyone now than it has been in the past. The black-hatters don't dominate the scene anymore primarily due to the work involved, the cost and the fact that they have found other easier methods to make money - primarily in the social network arena.
In my next post I will outline the basic system for earning revenue with Adsense. I want to say up front that there is work involved. You won't be getting rich quick and there are a few ethical hurdles you may have to get over. In my last post I mentioned that I finally had a $200 day but you shouldn't expect this. It has taken me a good year of learning and the best part of another year to implement my system to get to this stage. It has been work. In reality I should only be making half the amount but I got lucky with one keyword. I have yet to find a second one of this calibre. You should expect to create a site that can generate about $10 a day. Once done you work on another and again and again. No tricks (well maybe a few) - just repetition. I will also show you how to create a multi-niche site.
It has taken me two years to make a decent income with this. For me it has been worth the work. I can't promise you anything but if you can stick to something and aren't afraid of a little work then you should be able to accomplish similar results. The best thing about Adsense is that eventually there is little work to do and the money just keeps coming in.
What's in a Keyword?
Labels: ADSENSE LESSONS, HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE, KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATIONIf you are a first time visitor you probably won't even read this - what on Earth would a cheesy looking blog like this know about making money online. Most first timers take a quick look and then hit the back button and are gone. A percentage leave by clicking a link somewhere on the page. If you are still reading this then chances are you are one of my readers that has got past the cheese and knows that I actually have real content on these pages - the vast majority of it really does explain how I make money with this free no frills Blogspot blog.
In a nutshell I make money with this blog by explaining the SEO techniques I use to target terms like "make money online". I make money by simply ranking high in the serps for terms related to making money. That's it. I don't even need a single person to read a single word of a single post on this blog and I still make money. Good money too.
This blog will be a year old on December 23.
I have spent the past year writing posts that optimize various keywords that I have chosen based on the amount of traffic those keywords generate on the search engines. I built this blog without ever expecting or caring if I ever had a real audience of readers. My goal was simple - generate large amounts of search engine traffic and convert that traffic into Adsense clicks and affiliate sales.
I have had to modify my tactics somewhat from my initial plan due to the fact that I seem to have built up a small but growing readership and in deference to them I have had to shelve my affiliate sales pitches - you won't appreciate me hawking products designed to entice the unwary blogging newcomer. I haven't totally given up on this revenue stream yet it's just I haven't figured out a "Reader Alert" system to warn my regular readers when they should simply ignore a post logged for the purpose of affiliate sales. I will work it back into the mix at some point as there is just too much money sitting on the table with affiliate sales for me to ignore. I know because the first six months I made a decent buck from affiliate sales by optimizing this blog for those types of keywords.
The loss of affiliate sales has been mediated by the sharp increase in Adsense revenue as my main keywords have slowly climbed Google's search engine rankings.
For all of you that think Adsense is crap and doesn't pay much I have news for you... it is still the single easiest and best source of long term income online. If you haven't made money from Adsense it's because you don't know how - not because it doesn't work.
I now rank in the top 1-2 pages on Google for all the main "Make Money" keywords. This past week I finally hit page 1 for several highly searched terms and before I show you what this has meant I want to show you a few of those rankings.
I have yet to reach page 1 for my Prime keyword - "make money online" - but I am on page 2 of Google.com (The US region)
Note: I reached page 1 in February, 2008.
(click images to enlarge)
I have however hit page 1 for "make money online" in most of the smaller Google regions like this serp from a query originating in the Netherlands.
There are a couple of things I want to point out as you look at these and the following screenshots. A week ago there were about 170 million competing sites in Google's index. Today there are only about a 10th of this amount.
Google has just quietly cleaned house once again and eliminated millions of sites that are deemed irrelevant. Not just in this niche either - I have noticed this across all my niches. While this will have little effect on most of you, I point it out for interest sake as it is just one more step Google has taken recently to clean up its rankings. For those of us making money online this just means less competition and that's always welcome.
The other thing you should notice is the frequency of Blogspot.com blogs listed on the top search pages. People love bashing Blogger for all sorts of reasons but primarily because it doesn't look as professional or as nice as a self hosted wordpress blog or it is limited in many ways that wordpress blogs aren't. This is all true but when it comes to making money online all those nice looking Web 2.0 blogs aren't in the same ballpark.
Making money online and producing a reader friendly A-list style blog are not the same thing. Every time I hear a Web 2.0 blogger put down Blogger I cringe. People who haven't made a dime online are busy telling other people who haven't made a dime how to make money online by creating fancy looking social network friendly blogs. That is not how you make money online - that is how you try and make a name for yourself. Making a name doesn't mean you make any money. Ranking on top of the search pages does.
Keyword: "how to earn money online"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money online"
4 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "making money online"
2 Blogspot blogs in top 10
(BTW - how many A-List blogs did you see in the top ten?)
And...
What has making the first page meant in terms of earnings? Until last Saturday I was receiving 10-20 visitors a day each from Google for most of these terms. I was on page 2. Since Sunday I have seen up to 10 times the traffic for some of these keywords.
See my Feedburner search engine keyword stats up until mid afternoon today.
A week ago I was averaging $10-$15 per day in Adsense revenue.
Check out my earnings since Sunday.
Not a bad increase at all. Guess what? All my niches have gained traffic in the wake of Google's housecleaning. I mentioned a few weeks back that I had finally broke the $200 a day barrier for Adsense earnings.
Look at yesterday's total earnings for my entire network.
Kinda blew by the $300 a day barrier - almost anti-climactic.
A word to the wise for all of you Web 2.0 bloggers - keep your nice blogs and play with them to your hearts content but don't expect to make money with them. If you want to make money online do yourself a favor and learn two things; stop complaining about Google and learn why Google is important and then learn how to SEO.
Think about the fact that once you do the work it just keeps paying you day after day and you don't have to worry about readers and posting schedules or spending all day stumbling and digging. I haven't done a damn thing in three days and the money just rolls in.
There really is an easy way to make real money online and I have just shown you what it is.
Adsense.
In my next post I will tell you why there are so many high ranking Blogspot blogs and then go over some little known tricks and tweaks for optimizing both search rankings and Adsense.
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