Google has made it very easy these days to find out how well your site is doing in their search engine, even if you aren’t getting much traffic.  Google Webmaster Tools is improving all the time and what it gives access to now is very powerful.

There are quite a few conspiracy theorists out there who don’t like giving Google any more information than what they’ve already got, but I feel that if you can’t back your web site to pass the toughest of Google tests then you are doing it wrong already. A lot of them are running AdSense anyway…

If you haven’t verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and you are chasing organic traffic, do it right away.  The verification can be tied in with Analytics code now so kill two birds with one stone and set it up as well.

The section of GWT I’ll be talking about today is the Search Queries page.  Select the domain you want to examine and from the dashboard click the more link after the list of recent search queries.  This will take you through to a detailed view of all the activity your page is receiving across the different Google data servers and specific search engines.

This screenshot shows some of the latest editions to GWT, some newer than other.  The number of impressions, clicks and CTR has been available for some time but the Change % is pretty recent.  This page can be very handy in finding out what is currently working and where you should focus your time to get fast results.

I just want to point something out that I have mentioned in the past – the importance of getting a #1 ranking.

If I sort the results by total number of clicks you can see that the 4^th result down is giving this site the same amount of traffic as the 3^rd result.  The 4^th one is only getting 880 searches/month compared to 6,600/month for the 3^rd.  The only difference is that one is ranked #2 while the larger searched keyword is ranked #7/8.

If that keyword jumped from #2 to #1, I would expect to get similar traffic to the keyword getting 8,100 searches per day, currently ranked at #6/7.

You can use these click through rates to focus on the keywords that will give the most return.  Go through the list and do a fresh competition analysis on all of the keywords and find the ones that will take the least amount of work to push up to #1 (or at least #2).

Often you will find that you are better off working with the keywords you have got rather than creating new content and starting from scratch again.  The number one rank is that lucrative.  If that 8,800 searches/month keyword managed to hit the number one rank you would get an immediate increase in traffic of roughly 130 searches/day.

GWT is also great at finding keywords that you haven’t directly targeted.  As your site builds up authority it will start to rank for long tails and even shorter more lucrative keywords.  This progress won’t be found in your stats pages though; people rarely click through on results ranked higher than the middle of the second page.

By keep an eye on the keywords appearing in the search queries you can see which of these words and sneaking up.  Once they do appear you can start sending through backlinks with appropriate anchor text to pages Google already likes.  It is a real time saver!

I like to look for results ranked higher than 15 that are getting a reasonable amount of impressions.  I then take those keywords and check the traffic numbers in the Google Keyword Tool or Market Samurai and confirm the numbers.  Do competition analysis like normal and then decide whether it is worth sending some anchor text backlinks to the page for that term.

Here is a keyword ranked #18 getting 210 searches/month.  I checked it out in Market Samurai and it has the potential for 325/day; the top 10 isn’t too though either.  If I add this to the mix of anchor text while building backlinks to the page being return, I should get some positive results pretty quickly.  This will also help the page for its better ranked keywords.

I have found many high searched phrases that I would never have dreamed of by searching through Google’s Webmaster Tools.  Give it a try as you may have a real goldmine waiting 1 or 2 pages off the front.

Another problem many marketers (and maybe even yourself) face is coming up with fresh and exciting content that matches what the market is after.  It isn’t uncommon for content writers to just get stuck not knowing what to write next.  It happens to me all the time!

Find out what your market is after and you will be ahead of the game.

Luckily, there is a great solution to both problems that will put the ideas for content right into your head, and it is exactly what the readers will be looking for!

When I first started my journey into internet marketing I was looking for quick and easy solutions to making money overnight.  I was all over the shop and wasn’t exactly setting the IM house on fire….

What I did stumble upon was a great way to get a lot of traffic, fast.  I was using celebrity scandals to generate unique content to capture the ensuing surge of traffic.  I then started keeping my eye out for big television shows and reality TV contests that were about to end and having a page up and running before it happened.

Competition wasn’t much of a problem as my page was already established with enough backlinks (but still not a lot) to keep it above fresh and up and coming pages.  I was ranking number 1 for a page that no one else was targeting before anyone was searching for it.  The page was locked and loaded for the fresh flood of traffic.

Unfortunately, the traffic for the celebrity searches was pretty poor…

But, with a bit of imagination you can use this method for nearly any niche market!

There are a couple of ways you can attack this  If your site is still pretty new and it is taking a while for Google to index your pages, you are better off trying to predict events in your niche market before they happen.  If your site has been running for a while and it only takes a day or less for a new page to be indexed, you can also follow current news and post your own unique spin – as it happens.

Predicting what will happen beforehand is pretty easy with powerful free tools like Google Trends and Insights.

If you go to Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) and enter in your niche or market you can get an overview of the big news stories that occurred over a set period of time.  Ideally you will see a corresponding peak in traffic but this isn’t crucial.  Just use the news articles to brainstorm for events that happen within the market each year.

You can see what gets returned for the term “fashion” in 2009 and 2010 in the examples below.

Fashion Trends 2009

Fashion Trends 2010

From these graphs you can see that there is a few annual events that might be worth looking further into; Oscar Fashion, New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week.

Let’s look further into Oscar Fashion…

Head over to Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/) and enter in “Oscar Fashion”.  To see what was being searched for last year, change the date to 2009.  (Change the location too if you are only interested in local searches).

Fashion Oscar 2009 - Google Insights

Now you have access to the keywords used to find information for “Oscars Fashion” in 2009.  The Oscars have already occurred in 2010 so let’s see what keywords were used this year…

Fashion Oscar 2010 - Google Insights

See how similar they are?  What do you think they will be searching for in 2011?  I think you get the idea!

Finding these breakouts and regular events in your particular niche will require a bit of research and brainstorming.  Find an industry news website and look through the archives for ideas.  Plug them into Google Insights or Trends and work from there.  The content you create will only be good for a short timeframe but if you are a competent writer you can follow the trends all year long.

Even if you miss an upcoming trend, you can also hit them as they appear.  Browse to the latest Google Hot Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X) and have a look at the current list.

Google Hot Trends for Niche News

If you see something related to your niche then get some content on your site about it asap!

Once again, find some industry news sites and pick out the interesting news articles and create your own spin for your site.  Even just 1 or 2 articles a day will keep traffic flowing nicely to your site.

Create a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) for you niche and track news and blog results for fresh ideas right to your email or RSS.

Niche Ideas Using Google Alerts

Twitter is becoming very handy for finding trending topics too.  If you look hard enough you can pick up content and ideas before other websites.  Use your SEO skills to keep them from over taking you.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to rank for fresh content on the web…

Twitter Search to Find Niche News

There are a lot of ways to make use of these sites and features.  An entire site can be built off the traffic.  Capture the traffic into a mailing list; mention related affiliated products;  stick to trusty AdSense…use your imagination and you will have a lot of success with your fresh new traffic source.

Take the time to get the niche selection right in the first place and you will save a lot of money and time down the track.

I know this is just common sense but not everyone gets it right.  Many are stubborn; others are just unaware.

I often get emails from people who are struggling to get results and this is usually due to being in a niche with little search traffic, strong competition, or limited ways to monetize.  Even after being told about the lack of scope available to improve, a lot of the people struggling refuse to adapt and are stuck working on a project with little potential – don’t be that person!

There are several elements of niche selection that you need to consider before committing to a website:

• Traffic
• Monetization
• Competition

I like to look at them in that order.  Traffic is the key but is wasted if you can’t monetize it.  Competition takes the longest time to analyse and no point wasting your time on it if the market isn’t worth it to begin with.

First things first…how to find a niche to start with?

Brainstorm!  Start getting used to writing down any idea that pops into your head.  Once you start writing things down on paper other ideas will start flowing from these base ideas.  Start your list by writing down everything you love to do in your spare time.  It is much easier to create content for a subject you genuinely enjoy.

Add to your list any problems that you may have in your life or get asked for advice on.  Other people might see you as an expert on something that you have never really considered pursuing.  If the knowledge is there to begin with it will make content and even content creation a breeze.

The ideas on your paper are a great starting point and usually from this list you can expand out to related niches very easily.

If your list is still small then grab a magazine off the shelf and start flipping through the pages.  Take note of the common subjects and questions being answered.  Look at the advertisers and try and brainstorm from what you see.  Ideas could be types of products, common problems, useful information…

Work backwards.  If you find a product or two in a niche that appears too small, take a step back and find out what niche the sub niche belongs to.  Expand from there.

Still struggling to fill up the paper?  Head over to Amazon.com and start clicking through the categories.  The Non Fiction books are a great place to browse.  Find the best sellers and brainstorm from there.  Head out of the house and make a trip to the library or favourite bookstore and look at the best selling sections there.  Sometimes it is easier to keep a clear and focused head away from the computer.

Your list should be pretty full now…let’s see which ones are worth making a site for.

Traffic

This is the big one; what point is a website if no one sees it?  Like any business, the more people walking through the doors the more money you can make.  Many people neglect this basic qualifier for creating a site.

You can get your traffic from several different places but they all require different skill sets and methods.  Organic (search engine) traffic, social media, video, and paid advertising are all valid options.  Organic is the easiest to qualify and I will go into more detail below but social media and video require a bit of thought.

Content that attracts interest from social media sites is quite a bit different to the usual stuff people write about on affiliate sites.  People on Digg or StumbleUpon aren’t going to be interested in a review of a toaster so you would need to make your content a lot more creative.  If your niche isn’t suited to creative writing techniques that attract the needed viral attention then social media isn’t really an option for getting traffic to your site.

The same goes with video.  If you aren’t equipped or prepared to create video content for a site or the videos already in your niche aren’t attracting much attention then video may not be an option.  If YouTube is loaded with related videos and backed by an active group of viewers then video marketing may be a viable traffic generating option for your site.

Organic Traffic

If your niche isn’t suited to viral social media marketing or attracting attention through videos then the other and most common traffic generation method will be from search engines (mainly Google). The majority of marketers go this route.

Finding out the potential traffic from Google is pretty simple.  You can either use the Google External Keyword Tool or my favourite – Market Samurai, to get the number of searches happening each month (or day for MS).

I have covered this previously here (So You Want to Create a New Niche Website but Don’t Know Where to Start?) but to recap…

Take a niche idea from your notepad and create a new project for the word in Market Samurai and head to the Keyword Research Module…make sure Include Additional and Google Search Keywords is selected.  Generate Keywords and Analyze.

Sort the list of words by broad searches.

From here you can get an idea of what people are searching for – related to your search.  If the numbers are large you know there is traffic available for the niche.  Don’t worry about finding specific keywords yet as we have to make sure it can be monetized first…

Monetization

The traffic is there but what are you going to do with it?  Think of the niche you have chosen and try and think of what the demographic will be after.

Do they want a guide on how to create, succeed, complete, or learn?  Digital products are one way to make some money from information hungry customers.

You can check out sites such as Clickbank to find products created by other marketers that may be suitable to your niche.  If you can’t find a suitable product then that might be a golden opportunity for you to create your own.

Users after information are also great candidates for you to start a mailing list.  Instead of sending them straight to the offer place them on a mailing list and prime them for a sale over time…

If the information for the site is more general and not suitable to a guide or electronic product then have a look at Google AdSense.  If the market is popular amongst advertisers then the clicks you get from AdSense can be very worthwhile.  Have a search for other sites in the niche that are using AdSense on their site.  If the advertisers are related to the niche market then you should get like advertisers on your site too.  Check the sites like SpyFu to get an idea of what the advertisers are paying per click.  You will only get a portion of this on the content network but anything averaging over $2 per click is worthwhile.

If the demographic are chasing products then there are some great options available.  Amazon.com is my favourite.  You can find pretty much any product you can think of there.  Search the site and see what’s available.  If there are a lot of high selling products then Amazon is a great option – especially for niches where AdSense isn’t suitable.

There are sometimes higher paying affiliate programs for Amazon products so you do have room for choice.  Commission Junction often has high paying offers direct with the suppliers.  You can also use Google to find other affiliate programs.  A simple Google search for keyword +affiliate can return some great results.

Another option to lookout for are Cost per Action (CPA) offers.  CPA offers will give you a set amount for each lead you generate for an Affiliate Network.  These can be anything from a simple email submit form to a large survey.  Many of the larger markets pay quite well for a lead so give them some consideration when looking at your options.  You can use this search engine (Offer Vault) to see if there are any CPA offers available for your selected niche.

Sometimes a niche is suited to multiple monetization methods.  If you plan properly you can make great use of this to boost your income significantly.  The beauty market in general is a mix of people looking to solve problems and people looking to buy products…think about if you can capture the people looking for information on a mailing list and using that same mailing list to promote the product reviews you have already written to attract other searches.  You can have a continually growing group of targeted users reading every new review you write – as well as the daily traffic looking at those reviews from Google.

If you can’t find a way to monetize your niche from any of the above methods then drop it now and look at the next one on your list of ideas.

If you are happy that the niche has money in it then let’s see if you can compete for it.

Competition

It is now time to get down to the nitty-gritty.  If you have read my report on competition analysis then you already know what you should be looking for…easy keywords!

Take the list of keywords you generated when looking at the potential traffic and start drilling down into the list to find keywords you can compete for.

I generate keywords in a couple of runs.  From this initial list I look for seed keywords with a broad search of 2000+ times/day.  I go through the list and open the 2 to 3 word combos that are related to the niche into a new tab.  These words will be used to seed more similar keywords.  Make sure the seeds are unique so you don’t repeat yourself down the track (red widget = widget red).

You can now browse through the tabbed keywords and generate a fresh list of keywords – remember to change over “Include Additional Results” to “Ignore Additional Results”.  From the fresh list of keywords set the match type to Exact.  Filter out all keywords with less than 78 results.

I cover this in more detail here in the Let’s Get Some Keywords section.

With nothing but highly searched exact matched keywords remaining you can start doing the competition analysis as described in my free report.  Write down all of the ones that have weak competition into a text file.

If after analyzing all the keywords you still have enough words to make a site with decent traffic you know you have found a niche suitable for a new website.  The site will have sufficient achievable traffic to a monetized site.

If you find that the competition for the current group of keywords is generally a little too strong and the niche supports a product based monetization method – try looking for some products within the niche and repeating the keyword analysis on their names.  It is quite common that the products within the niche are less competitive than the general keywords and the searches are still high.

Still no luck?  Find the big forums in the niche and look for the common questions and terminology that you may not have thought of.  People within a niche may use a different language to those outside…

If the product names and variations are still too competitive and you can’t brainstorm another angle from the forums then give the niche a miss and head to the top and restart the process.

Just remember to be picky at the start to reap the rewards later.  An extra hour, day or even week of researching the niche will save you months of wasting time on a doomed website.

There are many plugins available to display Google Adsense on a WordPress blog but the one I choose to use is Simple Adsense Insertion (SAI). To use this plugin you simply insert your Adsense campaign code into one of the SAI campaigns and then use the provided tags ( or “echo show_ad_camp_1();”) to position them throughout your site.

To display an ad unit under the title of each post you will need to edit your themes template:

1.  Go to you WordPress Admin page.
2.  Download and install Simple Adsense Insertion using the built in plugin browser.

Simple Adsense Insertion Settings

3.  Go to the plugin settings for Simple Adsense Insertion and add in your Google Adsense code and copy down the tag for your campaign “echo show_ad_camp_1();” for example.

Theme Template Editor

4.  You now need to modify the templates to insert your campaign onto your site. Browse to “Appearance > Editor”

Theme Template List

5.  On the right hand side of the page you need to select the Main Index Template (index.php).  This is the main file for your public site so be careful not to modify the wrong thing.  If you are unsure on how to backup the file off an FTP then I recommend copying all of the text from the text-area into notepad and saving it for safe keeping.  If things go wrong you can always copy the text back.

6. The next step will vary slightly depending on the theme that you use and the way it outputs the posts.  You need to browse through the index.php file and find where the content of a post is sent to the browser.  The easiest to find this is use your browsers find function and look for “the_content(“.   This should be positioned in between a <div> tag with an id of something like “content”, “entry”, or “story”.  This is all theme dependant.

To display your ad unit before the post’s content  simply add “<?php echo show_ad_camp_1(); ?>” before “the_content(” but after the opening <div id=”content”>.
7.  You can now save the changes to the file and have a look at the result on your home page.  There should be a Google Ad Unit displayed before the content of each post now.

One of the problems of adding the ad unit to each post is that Google only lets you display three units per page.  If you look at posts after the top 3 you will either have a large chunk of space or a non paying ad in its place, depending on your Google AdSense settings.

To get around this problem a counter can be added to the index.php inside the loop that makes the posts.  When this counter is less than 4 display a Google Ad, when it is equal or greater display nothing (without the large blank space) or display an ad from another affiliate.

Adding a counter is quite simple.  Firstly find the start of the loop used to display posts.  For most themes it will look something like

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Directly above  this line add the following code so it looks like this:

<?php $totalPosts = 0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

To increment the totalPosts  counter add the following code directly under the opening of the while loop:

<?php $totalPosts = 0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php $totalPosts++; ?>

Now go down to where you added “<?php echo show_ad_camp_1();  ?>“.  Change this to:

<?php
     if( $totalPosts <= 3 )
     {
          echo show_ad_camp_1();
     }
     else
     {
          //add other ad campaigns here
     }
?>

If you have other ads to display that use php code then simply place that code inside the else statement {}.

Save these changes and go and look at your home page now.  It will no longer have blank spots or ugly unwanted ads on post four and after.