Picking Adsense Niches That Pay
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Woke up to a nice rainy Saturday morning here in Chicago. It’s almost 50 degrees outside! Really weird for December, but I’ll take it! Look for November’s roundup numbers tomorrow, I should have them put together by then.
Had another great earnings day yesterday, if December holds steady at these numbers then I’ll be pretty happy! Yesterday Adsense earnings were down a little, at $77 but Amazon commissions were a monster $53 off of $763 worth of items purchased. Love that holiday shopping season! That’s a total of $130 for the day.
Today I want to talk about ways to pick good niches for your website that pay out a lot of money.
It’s all about the niche
One mistake people make is that they don’t pick niches that have many advertisers. If there aren’t many people buying ads, then you won’t make much money selling adsense ad space on your website. Seems pretty simple.
One way I get around this problem is to only focus on product related niches; that way I feel pretty safe. Sure some products will have more advertisers buying ad space then others, but I feel that on the whole I’ll have better luck then if I built quilting hobby websites and things like that.
I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at just guessing what niche is going to have a lot of advertisers, so I don’t do a whole lot of research anymore (I take a more shotgun type approach and simply build thousands and thousands of sites – I figure I’ll get lucky somewhere and pick good niches!).
But other people are (probably rightfully) more discerning when they pick niches. They want to research so I’m going to share my favorite research methods today.
My two favorite ad research tools
When I actually do get around to doing ad research, I use two free tools. Those are:
Spyfu…
Spyfu is a pretty good all around niche research tool, but it’s especially good because it will tell you exactly how many advertisers are currently bidding on any given keyword, and what they are paying (generally) per ad.
Not only that, it will also show you a timelapse of advertisers over the last year or so…so you can tell if the keyword or niche is seasonal or constant. Seeing that there are twenty advertisers is great, but not so great if there are twenty only in June, and two or three the rest of the year. Spyfu gives you all this info and it’s free.
As a rule of thumb, I generally pick niches that have at least 15 advertisers or more. If I feel good about a niche, I might go with one that only has 10 advertisers, but rarely will I go below that. If you find a keyword or niche that has 20 advertisers, that’s a pretty good indicator that it’s a good niche.
Another rule of thumb, I usually halve the number that Spyfu gives you for ad spending. If it says that advertisers are currently paying $1.80 per ad, then I expect to make $.90 or less per click on my website whenever someone clicks one of my adsense ads for that niche.
A final rule of thumb, I usually only pick niches that have advertisers paying over $1 per ad (unless there are just a TON of advertisers – like 20-30 per keyword, then I might go lower). You have to split any ad money with Google, so ads paying less than $1 aren’t usually worth building a website around.
Adsense Sandbox
This is a new tool (well new to me) that one of my readers told me about the other day, and I’m really having a good time playing around with it.
Basically you just enter any given keyword, and this neat little tool will show you a whole page of the actual ads that people are paying to place under that specific keyword.
It shows both text ads (what I like to show on my websites) as well as rich image ads so you can see exactly what kind of ads you might expect to see on your website under any given keyword. It’s really fun to play around with if you’re a geek like me!
So there you have my two favorite tools for picking niches that actually pay well, and they’re both free. I wouldn’t spend a ton of time using them, because that can get in the way of building lots of sites, but if you’re ever not sure whether your niches are going to pay out well, these tools can help steer you in the right direction.
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
Rahul
03. Dec, 2011
Well this is great earning from amazon. My first ever amazon check is on way. I hope i will get this on feb. I think you can make $1000 per day. if you do lot more planning and target smaller long tails for every domain?
John
04. Dec, 2011
I think you could definitely do $1,000 per day with the right mix…it’s just a matter of scaling up and building more sites, not necessarily targeting smaller keywords. I think the trade-off in time vis marketing and backlinking etc needed to rank for those smaller and more competitive keywords would make it prohibitive. On the other hand, if 300 websites makes me $4,000 a month, it’s conceivable that 3,000 sites would bring in $40,000 a month (for instance). Just a matter of scale…actually I do have a project that is going to be doing that…maybe I’ll talk about it sometime 😉
Alan
06. Dec, 2011
Hi John,
Firstly, Great work on your site!
Secondly, what is your take on using brand names as part of an EMD, eg “Black and Decker cordless drill SKxxxxxx for sale.info” Would there be a copyright infringement problem that would force me to take the site down?
Cheers
Alan
The Marketing Fool
06. Dec, 2011
Hi Alan,
Thanks, glad you’re enjoying the site!
I never buy trademarked brand domains. You might get away with it for a while, but it’s just not worth the hassle. I know dozens of people who have received cease and desist letters and phone calls from company lawyers and had to take down those sites.
The thing is, when you get right down to it, you don’t need to do that! You can create “pages” that have trademarked names in the url…for instance using your example, you could build:
mycordlessdrillsite.com/black-and-decker-cordless-drill-SKxxxxx-for-sale.html
And would be fully within the law to do so (I’m not a lawyer, but that’s my understanding). Using trademarked names after the slash / is perfectly legal and nearly as easy to get ranked at the search engines as using it in the actual domain name.
So that’s what I always do…always.
Alan
07. Dec, 2011
Hi John,
Thanks for the tip.
Have you already written about ranking a site, or is this something we can look forward to in the future?
Cheers
Alan
The Marketing Fool
07. Dec, 2011
Hi Alan,
Just for you, today’s article on Ranking Adsense Sites.
Hope it answers your questions.
Alan
08. Dec, 2011
Thanks John, spot on!
William
22. Feb, 2012
Hi John
When you build your websites, hundreds in your words, do you use sub-domains to keep the domain names’ cost in check?
How do you control the hosting and domains costs?
Thank you
William
The Marketing Fool
22. Feb, 2012
Hi William,
No, I don’t use sub-domains, I use .info domains and I buy them from godaddy for .67 cents each. You can learn how by searching around a little here on the site (I wrote an article about it around Thanksgiving). I use Servint for my hosting.