Thursday, February 21, 2008

First Step to Picking Your Adsense Niche

I constantly see people on the various message boards like www.warriorforum.com asking how to make money with adsense. I usually try and help those people out the most i can and send many private messages a day. That is why this blog was started to give some one a place to go to learn about adsense and what has worked for me.

The first step in any adsense campaign is to find your niche. Many people say do it about something you like, i say do it about something you can make the most money with and you will grow to like it. I have sites on topics i think are very boring but the amount the bring me per click motivates me to keep writing content and articles for those sites so my income grows every month.

The way i find a niche is first think what do people like, want and need. This can be done by watching home shopping channels, Oprah, and many other places like Google trends and ebay pulse or popular print magazines. In fact I found one of my best niches in Maxim magazine!!!

I then look at the niches and see what ones are more prone to information seeking and not product buying. What i mean by this is that if a woman wants to buy a purse she wants to see a picture of a purse and be able to buy it, she does not want to see a 300 word article on Gucci handbags. She will more then likely hit the back arrow within 1 second of your page loading. A niche like this has proven to be a loser and have very low click through ratios.

On the other hand if you had a niche site on "how to make you home more energy efficient" a person visiting expects to see articles outlining the process and will stay on your site loner and more then likely click your ads to get more information

The next step is to see if the niche is actually profitable, this can be tricky because what you make per click is a percentage of what the advertiser is willing to pay to advertise on the content network of Google adwords. This is usually much lower then what they are bidding for adwords keywords directly. As a safe bet bids for clicks of $2 or more are where you should start. Anything under $2 and it tells you there is not alot of money being made in that niche which translates into low content network bids by advertisers and a lower payout for you.

There are free ways to do this but I have very little time to do multiple things at the free sites that a good tool can do for me. I use a tool called nicheinspector to check out the potential earning potential of a niche. What nicheinspector does is along with providing you with a very accurate keyword list it also provides you with the amounts the advertisers are paying for clicks in google adwords plus the number of advertisers. Again I look for niches that pay from $2 and up, some of the higher paying niches like mortgages and insurance pay out alot but they are also very competitive and hard to rank well in. On the flip side less competitive niches ma pay less but you will in most cases get more traffic so it should even out in the end. The number of advertisers is also important to look at, usually 20 or more advertisers will be good any less and the amount of displayed ads may not be at the optimal level.

Nicheinspector also has a very cool brainstorm function which will randomly generate search topics and there click bids. If you see something you like you can narrow the niche down and build a site around it. This is a great function when you have a mental brain block you need to get by!

3 comments:

Daryl McCoy said...

Good post. For people that have more time, cruising crafts fairs, visiting active forums and Yahoo Answers are additional sources for ideas.

The point you made about the cost per click being high enough for your time is a valid one.

I'm working a niche right now that I'm passionate about but the CPC is so low for most terms the Adsense revenue generated is hardly worth mentioning.

B said...

I found your blog to be quite informative and useful. Thanks for th good tips.

D S said...

Thanks guys glad they helped you out, although I am by far a certified expert i try to be very analytical in my testing. I think this has allowed me to do fairly well.