Thursday, January 1, 2009

The AdSense Advantage - Day 2

"Discover The Hidden Niches That Churn-Up The Highest Payouts"

Finding topics is not the hard part. There are tons of 'AdSense topics' out there.

What people fail to understand is that even on the Internet, basic business rules still apply. If there is demand, you have a shot at making profits, provided that you differentiate and position yourself in the best possible way.

In other words, it is the execution of the idea that matters, and not so much the idea itself.

Now, keep in mind that you're looking for great niches for your AdSense, pay-per-click, content sites. Many of these will be product-oriented content or information-rich sites. We haven't gotten into it a whole lot yet, but the most successful AdSense sites are ones with free content.

Niche marketers often talk about starting out with topics that you are interested in, or are well-versed in. This, I feel, is bad advice. As helpful as it might be to someone starting out fresh in the content publishing field, it fails to address the main concern anyone would have when starting a business…

Profitability.

Let's face it - would you invest your time and money into a business venture if you knew that it was not profitable?

Of course not.

The key to picking a niche market, then, is profitability. In fact, profitability is the first filter you should apply to any potential niche topic.

A rough, 5-minute test to measure the profitability of any niche is to establish the niche's popularity in the PPC engines. By finding out the AdSense payout (per click) for the top keywords in that niche, or by finding out what the top bids are on AdWords (the system that the advertisers are paying into), you'll have an idea of what the market considers this niche's profitability to be.

AdSense payouts (per click) depend on how much the advertiser is willing to pay for the click. In addition, that amount depends on how much the advertiser makes from the sale of one of his products (in essence, it's the value of one customer).

For example, PPC bid prices for high-end financial keywords (debt consolidation is a common example) can go as high as $70 a click!

Lesser known topics include any traveling or tourism niche, personal yachts and gardening, where the average high-paying keywords hover around $3 and $4 per click.

With this being said, if you're looking to make a killing with Adsense, I would stick to the keywords paying out around $1.00-$4.00 a click, rather than shooting for keywords in the "debt consolidation" neighborhood, which everyone and their brother is targeting.

I personally do a lot of my keyword research with Keyword Elite. I won't go into the details right now, but I've been able to gather HUGE lists of the highest paying, most profitable keyword niches from this software.

If you follow the 'high-road', digging into expensive industries, you'll find tons of niches. The only problem is that many of the niches you'll find will probably be very competitive and have little room left for you conquer.


What can you do about this?

You've got two options…

1. You can either keep digging until you find a niche that is both profitable and has little competition…or…

2. You could dig deeper into the niche you just found and try to find a sub-niche that is not so heavily competitive.

I prefer the 2nd option. These are known as micro niches. They're a narrow, specific sub-topics that are extremely profitable regardless of the profitability of the general topic itself. As demand is limited, such niches are quickly saturated, but the barriers to entry are low and you can establish yourself fairly quickly in these niches.

The simplest way to look for a topic (in case you don't already have one) is to find out what people are buying, day in and day out. This boils down to observing the major marketplaces on the Internet (such as Amazon and Ebay) and going through the most popular items.

Usually, you'll find some good ideas coming out of this exercise. The only problem is that at this point, you only have a general idea of what that niche is like, and what sells in that niche.

So this is where the keyword research comes into play again.

With a keyword research tool like Keyword Elite, you can type in the main keyword of your topic. The result will be those keywords plus a list of several alternative keywords. (WordTracker and NicheBot do similar things, but aren't as in-depth). These 'alternates' will be your sub-topics or micro-niches.

Then, with Keyword Elite, you can enter those keywords into a separate project and create a list of VERY important information for your keyword research. You will want to choose keywords with high paying CPC, low competition, and a high number of searches.

Using Keyword Research The Right Way

Keyword research is at the heart of every online business whether you're writing an info product or creating an online store, you're going to need keyword statistics to tell you:

What people are searching for.
Competition for those keywords.
Ad costs for those keywords.

I offer a Free Silver membership to my HyperVRE software, where in addition to getting the free software, you'll have access to the Top 40,000 Highest Paying Keywords. It's a great tool to help you sift through several different niche topics that all pay very well. I give you the option to search through 40,000 keywords with a built-in search tool in your membership area.

With AdSense sites, depending on ad costs and traffic, keyword research becomes even more critical for you to get your hands into.

Within the context of AdSense, this refers to finding out about the topics that create the most buzz and are easy markets to break into.

While you don't need to spend days overanalyzing a niche, checking out what works and what doesn't in a niche will help you a lot in creating an 'AdSense' site in that niche.

Find out what it's going to take to beat your competition in search engines and in your niche. How many links do they have? Do they use heavy advertising? Are they using any other revenue source apart from AdSense? If yes, what is it?
And perhaps most importantly, find out how much content and webpages does the top sites in your niche have. Can you put up that much content?

“You’ve Heard It Before… Test, Test, Test”

Test your site for at least 3-6 months.

It helps you establish baseline figures for traffic and potential revenue in that niche, and this information helps you make decisions on whether to develop the site further and also guides you in creating further sites in the same niche.

Of course, that doesn't mean that you should sit around waiting for one site to show results before getting started on the next one. Keep building your sites.

Don't stop building.

Analyze Your Niche

Remember, the focus is on creating AdSense sites here but you can (and should) use other revenue sources, such as Amazon, Chitika, ClickBank, and other affiliate product resources.

The process is fairly simple - you find a topic, evaluate its profitability and demand, and if all things click, give it a test run by putting up some content and driving traffic through links and content distribution. I personally use LinkMetro.com to quickly build hundreds of links pointing to my sites.

Run the site for a couple of months and watch your stats. Chances are, your early AdSense revenues and traffic stats won't be anything to brag about… but keep watching them because it usually doesn't take much time before they start to increase (if you're getting legitimate traffic to your site).

Now - when you check out your stats in your Google AdSense account area, you'll notice that they only give you about 4 categories. Though each of these categories is very important, you should also be tracking your stats more in-depth with an AdSense tracking tool such as AdSpyTracker. I'll talk more in detail about the best ways to track your stats in a future lesson, but for now you need to know two of the most important stats.

The basic stats you'll need are:

average EPC (average earnings per click)
average CTR (average click-through rate)

With the help of these two numbers you can easily evaluate whether your venture will be profitable or not. These figures will also help you understand what you're doing wrong.

Use the average EPC to judge the profitability of your ads. This is simply your total earnings divided by the number of clicks on your site.

If you're earning at $1.00+ for each click, you're doing good. If that number rises to $2.00+ (difficult to do), you've struck a gold mine. On the other hand, if the average EPC is below $.05, you might have to rethink your strategy.

CTR measures the percentage of visitors that click on your ads. There are no set figures for CTR, but if no one's clicking on your ads, there's only one problem… "you haven't optimized your site design for displaying ads."

Don't worry about this right now, because in our next lesson I'll show you exactly how to optimize your websites for high click-through rates.

That's all there is for today's lesson. I realize it got a bit long, but everything I've talked about here is extremely important when you're looking to create a profitable niche.

The way to get rich on the Internet is to spread out to several niches - dominate one niche, then dominate the next, and the next… Don't just stick with one and try to build around it. Instead,spread out to multiple niches, and begin your 'online empire'. (there's that term again… )

In our next lesson, I'll take you through a total optimization of your AdSense sites, and show you how you can increase your click-through rate up to 100% by taking only 30 seconds of your time.

Take care,
 

Matt Callen
Internet Marketer

www.HyperVRE.com



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