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.

Today I am going to try and make sure you don’t make the same mistake I made which left easy money on the table – that could have been fixed overnight…

After making a few small changes to my Google AdSense Ad Units I was able to double my click through rate (CTR) for a consistent and fast improvement in income.

One of first things you are taught when creating a squeeze page or sales letter is to always test different versions of copy and formatting until you get a conversion rate you are proud of.  What I, like many, didn’t realize was that this should be applied to all forms of direct response marketing – AdSense included.

Just like how every market reacts differently to sales copy, people react differently to online advertising.  Using a template that provided a high CTR on your last site won’t necessarily produce the same results on the next.  It is crucial that you realise that there is no single best AdSense layout or theme that will work for every type of site or every market.

How to Optimise Your AdSense Layout

So how do you find the most optimised AdSense layout for your current site?  Easy!  Test it just like you would a squeeze page.

Many people get a bit anxious when it comes to performing testing on a web site but there is a way to achieve it without relying on installing complicated scripting. When testing, it is important to compare results against similar sets of data. Often people make a judgment on the effect of a change after just 1 or 2 days.  These 1 or 2 days might be different to other days though and this can skew the results.  A test on a weekend will also produce inconsistent results as the traffic on the weekend is different to the rest of the week.  It is less frequent and is usually made up of more casual surfers.  Dismissing a test on a Saturday because it produced fewer results than Friday may be misleading.

(You also have to be aware of holidays and other world or local events that may affect the traffic to your page.)

I find that across an entire week the traffic levels sit on average and the spikes cancel out any troughs.  1 week on most sites gets enough traffic and clicks to make an informed decision on the results of the test.

Note: testing a site that has low traffic may produce inconsistent results so I recommend getting at least 50-100 unique visitors to your site before doing significant testing.  A quick way to tell is if your CTR is consistent across the course of a week.

How to Test AdSense Layouts

The ideal way to test a page is to do an A-B split test.  This involves randomly sending a user to either version A of a page or version B.  Across a week the number of views of A and B will be approximately 50%.

For testing AdSense A-B testing can be difficult and time consuming to setup.  There is another approach though that will still produce accurate results…

Run an AdSense layout for an entire 7 days in format A and then another 7 days in format B.  After the 2 weeks is up compare the results and note the winner…pretty simple huh?  Just make sure you start and end on the same day each week and your traffic will be consistent enough to make the right decision.  At the end of each week make sure you document the number of impressions, click through rate, average cost per click and eCPM.

You can then repeat the process for a 3^rd, 4^th, n^th week continually trying to beat the best performer.   You will get an idea of what does and doesn’t work each time you make a drop or rise.  Once you start failing to beat the best performer you can set it up as your permanent AdSense layout for that site.  It isn’t unusual to double your CTR after just a few runs of testing.

What Layouts and Formats to Try

When you make your changes don’t be afraid to try drastic changes.  Just make sure you document the current format before you replace it – you can always go back then.

It is a common belief amongst marketers using AdSense that blended ads work best.  This isn’t always the case.  If you have ever tried Google AdWords on the Content Network you would know that image ads often get the highest CTR.  Image ads when done right can really pop out of the screen and make the user at least look at them…

Use this to your advantage and try it out on your AdSense site too.  What works for the advertiser will work for the publisher.  Image ads may have a lower cost per click than text ads but the increased CTR should make up for this.  When comparing a change, especially involving image ads, make sure you look at the eCPM as this will take into account the higher CTR and the lower CPC.

One of the biggest boosts I had to my AdWords Image campaigns was when I changed the images over to blue text with a red border around the ad unit.  You don’t have control over the image ads on your AdSense sites but this effect can be applied to text ad units too and is well worth a try.  Set the title to blue, everything else to black, and add a red border. This works because people associate blue underlined text with hyperlinks.  I have had great success with this format on some of my sites, but not all.

If you are still using the default ad unit then give blending a try.  Change the font type and size to the same as your main content and set the title colour to the same as your links; the rest of the text will be the same colour as your content; there will be no border.

Positioning can also change drastically between sites.  Some markets respond well to the large rectangle in the top left before any content; others are more interested in reading what you have to say so you need to capture their attention elsewhere.

To capture this attention put the ads inside the content.  That same rectangle placed one paragraph into the content can have an instant effect.

Read up on some of the usability sites to get an idea of how people are interacting with different styles of sites.  This article from Jakob Nielsen on Scrolling and Attention made me try adding an ad unit to the end of my content.  People are looking for the next place to go after reading an article so by getting an ad unit in their face at this time gives those options.  Remove any other useful links around the footer to improve it even further.

Sometimes removing a unit can also have a boost on your CTR.  Too many ads might be causing ad blindness on your site so by relocating or removing a skyscraper ad unit in the sidebar might keep them guessing.

Don’t be Afraid to Try

Optimising your AdSense layout has to be one of the easiest and quickest ways to boost your income so don’t be afraid to give it a go.  If you do it this way you don’t even have to touch any code – just make the changes in your AdSense account.

If you make sure you document everything carefully, the only risk is having a week of less than average income; just change it back after the 7 days if the results don’t improve.  I encourage you not to panic after one try though as the next change might be the big one…

It would be great to hear if you do give it a go and get some positive (or even negative) results.

There is no right or wrong answer but I do have my own preference that I think uses the best of both worlds…

Each type of site has its own benefits; a mini-site has a clear goal and can make use of exact domain name matches for very fast results – 1 page in a week!

The problem is that they are often created with no scope in mind.  The exact match domain name often makes branding difficult and the pages, as informative as they may be, aren’t something that would make a user want to return or tell their friends about it.  They still require maintenance to keep them ranking on the first page of the SERPs and tracking the progress.

A large authority site on the other hand can make ranking new pages easy and these new pages can be added without upsetting the flow of the site.  The authority site can build up an online presence and become a true brand.   Different monetisation methods can be used depending on the page and keyword.  You can create powerful business opportunities with custom advertising and joint ventures that wouldn’t become available from a 5 page site about 4 slice toasters or yoga mates.

If you plan your large site right you can have a web site that is a great user experience that will have them returning for more after that initial Google search.  This opens up the opportunity of people in your niche talking about your site on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook accounts etc.  This free exposure is priceless…backlinks will flood in if your site is a resource of useful information!

A large site does take work and the results aren’t as fast as a mini-site (with exact match domain).  This puts a lot of people off.  With the right planning though a large authority site will produce faster results from new content over a mini-site as Google will begin to index content almost instantly.

Mini-sites do have a place.  I like to use mini-sites as a way to fund my larger online projects and experiment with my SEO techniques.  Rather than creating an army of 100+ sites that takes all day to track and manage, create a handful at a time and use the boost in income to fund the expansion of a few larger sites that have the potential to become something great online.

The income from the mini sites makes creating the larger sites easier as there is no panic to generate fast results.  You can plan properly and execute carefully without the fear of not having money coming through the door.

If you want to try a new backlinking method or site structure or some other secret SEO technique it is best to try it on mini-sites before risking a large site with history.  The results won’t be as skewed and if it backfires you won’t lose as much work.  It is easier to recreate a mini-site than a large authority site.

Once the large site is up and running and creating a nice income itself, you can cull back some of your mini-sites by flipping them for a lump sum bonus.  Your time can now focus purely on expanding the larger site or creating a new one.  Time won’t be wasted building hundreds of backlinks to hundreds of domains for small returns and trying to follow the ups and downs many keywords face – across many domains.

After 6 months of your large site being online you should start to get massive increases in results as Google learns to trust your domain.  It will be at a stage where you get quicker results be creating a new article on the large site rather than making a new exact match domain from scratch.  This is due to the authority, trust and internal link juice flowing through your site – things wasted on a mini-site.
If you are considering taking over the web with a swarm of mini-sites, take the time to consider if there is a more efficient way to spend your time.  Diversification is great and highly recommended but instead of spreading the work over 100 domains consider a handful of large authority sites instead.

Think of each of your sites as a small business rather than a way to get a few AdSense clicks or Amazon sales here or there.

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.

Many people have tasted some sort of success but struggle to move from micro niche sites making only dollars a day to a piece of virtual real estate that you can build a real business around.  They get caught up with a process without seeing the bigger picture.

I am currently assisting a Warrior who is passionate about his niche but is struggling to get solid results.  We thought that it would be beneficial to other new internet marketer’s if we shared what we were discussing and learning to hopefully help them get a foot in the door as well.

As a marketer, I make a great engineer.  I love numbers and stats but you have to forgive my poor writing and communication skills.  If something doesn’t make sense then just hit me up and I’ll try and reword it into English!

So you want to create a new website to monetise but don’t know where to start?

Unlike many, I don’t start off with a monetisation method in mind and go looking for sites to target.  Limiting yourself to a set monetising method already cuts your potential markets and keywords to only a small slither of what is really available.  Getting in your head from the start that you are going to make nothing but an AdSense site means that you will miss all of the products on Amazon and EBay; there might be CPA offers available that are perfect for certain keywords in a niche or high paying Click Bank products.  Your content is also limited.

Say you make a site about weight lifting, if you were to monetise solely by AdSense then you can target certain weight lifting products but the ads being presented are going to be about the niche in general, usually not about the product.  A user after reviews or wants to know where to buy Mega-x hyper-viper 5000 weight benches will not be as likely to click on a new protein powder than on a link to Amazon that gives them more information about where they can buy the Mega-x HV5000.

If you are getting 100 people a day viewing that page then your sales copy should be good enough to sell a weight bench every day.  That will be worth more than the 5 to 10 AdSense clicks.

Another problem with limiting yourself to AdSense is the markets that have a generally low CPC.  Many people who have followed the AdSense manuals are encouraged to skip those words.  Instead of skipping the word find another way to capitalise on it.  There might be a high converting Amazon product that will fit right in.  Maybe you can capture the users’ email address and send them a PLR product or your own product in return.  Sell them related products or services down the track.

If you are making a site for Amazon products don’t ignore the related keywords that are asking for information about the niche.  Your site might be about the Mega-x HV5000 mentioned earlier but while researching you find that someone is looking for Mega-x HV5000 exercises.  They obviously already own the product but might be interested in AdSense ads or joining another mailing list about those exercises.  Create your page for that term targeted for those other methods.

Finding Your Niche Market

The amount of markets available is practically limitless.  Nearly everyone can be profitable in one way or another.  Have a look around the house; read the newspaper; watch TV.  If you don’t have a passion in anything in particular than just write down anything and everything you can think of.  If you do have hobbies and interest in some topics, write them down at the top of your list.

Do not get your mind set on a niche until you know you can get traffic to it.   You have to learn to let go of something that will never work.  If you really want to make a site about the Mega-x HV5000 but the competition is too tough or the search volume is too low and it limits your ability to expand in the future, forget about it.  Move onto the next potential as quick as possible.  It will take a while but once you find a site with truly easy competition you will keep looking for weaknesses in keywords and markets that you shouldn’t be worrying about.

The key to a successful website is quality traffic.  Your niche must have the potential to get this traffic and it is the first step in qualifying your niche.  I won’t enter a market unless I know it can get 1000 unique visitors per day.  This traffic doesn’t have to come straight away as the site launches.  It doesn’t have to come from 1 keyword but if a site I do launch does have success then I want to know that I can improve on it with little extra work. It will give you room to expand.

Just to recap -

• Be open to various monetisation methods.
• Do not focus on a niche if it isn’t working or going to work – know when to walk away.
• Create a list of markets and niches that you can think of.  Prioritise with what you enjoy or know about.
• Keep in mind you want a large potential of traffic – say 1000UV/day.

Let’s Get Some Keywords

Once you have your list of niche ideas it is time to start moving through the list to generate potential keywords.  The tool you use for keyword research really doesn’t matter.  They all just tie into Google’s database so the results will always be similar.  I like to use Market Samurai at the moment because I make wide use of the domain search feature.  The trial version is enough to get your going and the keyword research feature is always free. It has also integrated Domain Samurai so searching for available domains is also easy.

Create a new project for your research and enter in your first niche as the keyword.  Move over to keyword research and from the base niche keyword check Google Synonym Tool, Include Additional, and Google Search Keywords. Generate your keywords.

This first run will be used to find various micro niches inside your niche.  It will also help you find what the real world uses to find the market.  Sometimes what you call an item or service is different to a large percentage of people.  This is particularly true across different Countries.

Click on Analyse Keywords to be taken to the Keyword screen.  This is what Google thinks is relevant to your market.  Keep the Match Type set to Broad – we aren’t looking for keywords yet, just starting points, seed keywords I guess the term is.

Go through your list and add any good looking seed words to new tabs.  The very top of your list will be some very broad terms that you will learn over time not to produce any decent exact keywords from.  Look at the 2 and 3 word combos with a broad search of 2000+.  These seed words will be used to create more similar keywords so don’t waste your time by doubling up.  “Red Widget” will produce the same results as “Widget Red”.  It will usually get the highly searched keywords that the seed “red widget reviews” would produce so there is no point in seeding “red widget reviews”.

You want seed words that contain unique combinations.

You must use some common sense that can’t be taught but the next steps will help you master this first step.  Experience really does help and once you have tried a few times you will understand.  Always keep the process in your mind the next time you do something.

If your list of seed words is small or the search volume is low then skip that niche and move onto the next one.  No point wasting more time on it when there are plenty more to choose from!

Once you have gone through and tabbed out all of the seed words you can switch the match type over to Exact.  Select the filter under Total Searches to 78.  This will give you a list of all words that gets searched 2400/month for your main niche keyword.  I wouldn’t go any lower than that.  There are so many easy keywords available that you will kick yourself down the track wasting your time on them.

Save the list of filtered results to a text file for later use.  This text file will contain all potential keywords for your niche.  Once save, remove the keyword from Domain/Market Samurai and move onto the first seed word one that you created a tab for.

With the seed selected do keyword analysis on the word but this time change the “Include Additional Results” to “Ignore Additional Results”. It is unlikely the additional keywords will be any different to the ones you had earlier so it will just clutter the results.

Generate your fresh set of keywords and move onto analysing them, i.e. change the match type to exact match and set the total results filter to 78.  Save the remaining keywords back to your master list.

Repeat the process for all of the seed words you got out of the initial analysis.  Your potential keywords list should have quite a few results in it now and each one should get you at least a bankable amount of traffic.

Are the Keywords Worth Pursuing? – Competition Analysis

This is probably the area where most people fail when researching a potential niche and/or keywords.  The goal for a marketer who relies on organic traffic is to get into the #1 spot on Google for their targeted keyword.  The next best result is landing somewhere on the first page.  This is achievable for most keywords after an appropriate amount of work is put in but for beginners who haven’t tasted success it is best to aim for the words that are very easy to rank well for.

Firstly, the number of pages with the words in the title, URL, description, or contain the phrase etc are not your competition.  They can give you a guide to what’s out there but it gives no indication of the difficulty to rank well for a keyword.

A page will rank well for a keyword based first on its relevance and secondly on its trust and authority.  Relevancy can be achieved by anyone, trust and authority cannot.

The basic way a modern search engine works is that when a search is initiated it creates a pool of results that are relevant to a term and then re-sorts those results based on its trust.  The final result is what the user sees.

PageRank (PR) is a representation of a page’s trust for the Google search engine.  PageRank is generated through backlinks to the page (BLP).  On-site SEO as well as the type of backlink creates the relevancy (I won’t get into an argument at the moment about anchor text or content creating this relevance).

Our competition is everyone above the position we want to achieve – the top 10 of Google results.

Know that on-site SEO factors can be achieved very easily so not a deciding factor.

Knowing that PR and BLP are key factors to a well ranked page, we now look for sites where the PR and BLP are low.  There are several tools that will do this – Market Samurai (paid with a free trial), or SEO Quake Firefox Plug-in (free but a little more fiddly).

With your list of potential keywords that you created earlier, move through each one in your software of choice and start looking at the top 10 results.  Focus on nothing but the PageRank and Backlinks to the Page.

You don’t have to do this but I add the data to an Excel spread sheet for each keyword in my list. Each row is a new keyword.  The first column is for the keyword; the next 10 are for the PR to the page of the top 10 results; the next 10 are the BLP to the top 10.  I then have a column for the average PR and the average BLP.  I create conditional formatting to highlight the average PR cell (green) for any keyword with an average top 10 PR of less than 2.  I do the same for keywords with an average BLP of less than 20.

I sort the data from lowest BLP to highest.  If I have a bunch of keywords highlighted green then I know I am on a winner.  Each of those keywords will be easy to dominate with little external backlinking.  Make sure that the total traffic from your group of filtered keywords is enough to create a site out of (I am looking for 1000 uniques/day).

Here are a couple of screen shots from Market Samurai of keywords that I rank #1 for.  It will give you an idea of what an easy keyword really looks like.

These filtered keywords will be the starting point of your new niche.  If the traffic isn’t there due to excessive competition then once again move onto a new one.  If the traffic is there, don’t discard the keywords that failed the competition filter.  These words may still be achievable but just not ideal to get the ball rolling.  As backlinks, age and authority increases with time these other words can start to come into play.  Using a high broad match as the starting points for your seed words will also give you room to move and the potential for a lot of long tail phrases.

Before you commit on using the niche go through each keyword phrase and start creating a mental picture of the type of site you are going to create.  Think of a way to monetise each phrase to try and get the ball rolling.  Think of long term goals too.  The keywords may make you lean towards something other than an affiliate or either a PPC type site.

I also recommend that you repeat the entire process for as many niches in your original list of ideas before proceeding.  It won’t be until you have seen the number of searches and competition levels of numerous keywords and markets before you get a real feel of what an easy niche really is.

Keep your mind open and realise that you now at least have a group of keywords with a lot of traffic potential to build your first niche site from.

What are these handful of people doing that the followers aren’t?  Quite simply they are doing something!  Too often than not, people new to the internet marketing industry spend too much time trying to find the next big thing rather than putting something into action.  By the next week these same people are hassling the next person to post their money making scheme leaving their Adsense venture to gather dust.

Google Adsense is not a fast way to make money but it is a vary scaleable and controllable method that once mastered can produce a relatively stable income.  It relies heavily on organic traffic so learning about Search Engine Optimisation is a must.  Once you know your traffic numbers and have tweaked your website design to obtain a Click Through Rate (CTR) of greater than 5% you will be able to predict your daily income.  From here you either build more sites or you add more content to your site until you have reached your goal.

If you want to make a real go of generating Google Adsense Revenue then you have to start out by prioritizing your time with a proper work schedule.

Over the next few weeks I will post my approach and plan of attack I use to build and promote my websites monetized with Adsense.