The following information uses a newly created Adsense site I created on Burkitt lymphoma as an example. While the information is sound, your mileage may vary.
Building a website that is designed to bring in revenue from the Adsense ads you place on it can be a worthwhile project that can bring you a seemingly endless supply of extra revenue. But if you go about this process in the wrong way, you’ll find that the results you were after may never materialize.
I separate this process of creating sites designed for Adsense into three steps, and I will focus on the first and most important step in this post.
Keyword Research and Competitiveness
Choosing the right keyword or niche is of vital importance. There is no point in launching a brand new site within a highly competitive and broad market because the chance of your new site ever attracting any attention is slim to none. No, you have to target narrowly defined niches with little to moderate competition if you want to stand a chance.
I like to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help find a profitable niche to build a website on. You use this online tool by entering in a keyword or phrase, and Google lists that term and related terms along with other information such as the number of monthly search queries (guage the traffic) and the average cost per click that advertisers pay.
The key to finding a good niche to develop on is to find the keyword phrase that receives at least moderate traffic while not being overly competitive. Results to avoid look like this:
The Google information listed for my example site on Burkitt’s lymphoma is:
Now you probably noticed that the competition level for my site is high, but a high competition level isn’t always a bad thing; they can be overcome in the right situations. If you run a Google search for “burkitt lymphoma” there are only about 500,000 pages listed. That’s a little more than I would have liked to see, but not enough to stop my efforts.
In contrast, the keyword “attorney” in the first image has about 150 million listings related to that keyword. I wouldn’t even think about trying to get a brand new Adsense site ranked in that mess.
After you discover a search term or multiple terms that are reachable, check into the average CPC (Cost per click) for the term. Obviously, the higher the monetary amount the better. I wouldn’t even mess with a term that had an average CPC of 5 cents; I’m looking for terms that pay a few dollars or more per click.
After doing this research you should hopefully have at least a few terms chosen that would be ideal to create an Adsense site for. Now you need a domain for them.
Go to whoever you register websites with (I currently switched to NameCheap instead of Godaddy) and search for a domain based on your keywords. For example, if your chosen keyword phrase is “camera surveillance equipment”, then you ideally would want the domain “camerasurveillancequipment.com”. If the .com domain is not available, then try for .net or .org. You could maybe even go with a .us domain name, but that’s as far as I would take it. I don’t recommend other extensions such as .biz or .info for our purposes in this.
So if all goes well, you will have narrowed down a niche to target and have now acquired the keyword rich domain names to go along with them. What’s next, you ask? That will be the topic of the next post!