How To Pick Adsense Niches

Hello good people!

Well rain swept across Chicago this morning and I’m moving slowly. I love it when it rains here, it’s the best time to grab the iPad and head down to Starbucks to sit by the window and think up crazy business schemes or just read.

Today I want to talk about picking niches for your adsense sites. I’ve touched on this a little bit in the past but I thought it might be a good idea to revisit it and flesh out my thoughts in a little more detail.

It’s all about the niche…right?

Most people think that picking the right niche is the most important part of developing an Adsense website, or even an entire Adsense empire. They will literally spend hundreds of dollars on keyword research tools. I’ll admit, I’ve done that myself in the past before I knew better.

What are these keyword tools I’m talking about? Well, there are lots of them, from the Micro Niche Finder tool, to Market Samurai keyword tool, and even many different services like the Wordtracker keyword service. Those are all in the $150-200 range, but there are even more expensive ones…

I’ve used them all…I’ve spent hundreds of hours on them, laboriously searching for the perfect set of themed keywords that will bring in the most traffic from the search engines and the most money from the advertisers.

But it was all wasted effort

I’m perfectly willing now to admit that it was all a waste of time. Completely and utterly. What changed? Well, I realized that specifically targeting certain keywords could never work. I’m just not smart enough to be able to predict what keywords will bring site traffic.

Keyword tools look at past data, and that gives you a good idea of what might work…but that’s not enough.

Why pick a few when you can target them all?

Then I started building my websites differently. Instead of building a site around a group of twenty or thirty keywords, I made the sites target thousands to millions of keywords. And I set them up to do it automatically.

How? By focusing on long tail keywords. Those are long strings of words, instead of short two to three word keywords. For example…

“Cordless Drill” would be considered a regular keyword….but “Black & Decker BD12PSK 12-Volt Smart Select Drill on sale” would be considered a long tail keyword.

What’s the difference? The free Google keyword tool tells me that “Cordless Drill” gets searched for by 246,000 people per month. But it tells me that “Black & Decker BD12PSK 12-Volt Smart Select Drill” gets searched for only 58 times per month.

Most people jump up and down and scream “GO WITH THE CORDLESS DRILL KEYWORD!” I mean, just look how many people search for it each month…if only 10% of those people come to my website I’ll be rich!!

Whereas 58 people isn’t even enough to earn you enough adsense money to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

But those people are wrong

You see, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to get your website ranked under that Cordless Drill keyword because there about a million other websites clamoring to get listed under that keyword too.

But there’s hardly anyone with a webpage dedicated exactly to the phrase “Black & Decker BD12PSK 12-Volt Smart Select Drill on sale”. If you optimize a page on your website for that exact phrase, you’ll likely get a top ten or even top three ranking without even trying.

And so you’ll get most of those 58 searchers per month to your site. Sure, that isn’t much…but if you target THOUSANDS of long tail keywords…and they each bring you one or two visitors per day looking specifically for that exact product (and seeing an adsense ad for that exact product, they’ll be far more likely to CLICK ON IT since that’s what they’re looking for), then you can quickly build up a very profitable adsense empire.

The only problem is, it’s hard to target thousands of long tail keywords. How do you find them? How do you build pages for them? It seems like too much work, and it is…unless you automate it.

And I’ll teach you how to do that in another article sometime. Until then…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

---

Did you like this article? Share it:

Tweet