6 Advice About Making Money With AdSense

6 Advice About Making Money With AdSense

Volume Trumps CPC

Everyone (especially the newbies) talk about finding the high cost-per-click (CPC) keywords. While the prospect of making $97.26 per click sounds really nice, it is not always the best strategy to target such keywords.

I would much rather go after a niche that gets 8,000 searches a month at $0.50 a click then one that has 1,000 searches a month at $3.50 a click. 8 times more traffic means 8 times more people potentially clicking an ad.

Where the search volume is higher, it is less crucial to be at the number one position in the search engines. When the traffic is high, there will be overflow from the top, there will be people looking for different things, there will be those who donʼt like the first search result and want the second search result, etc.

Overall, higher search volume means more opportunity.

Do Not Be Deterred By Competition

Unless you are trying to target the term “bodybuilding” or “credit report,” do not let competition scare you away.

When I was first starting out, I was so concerned with finding niches that were “low competition” that I ended up spending all my time researching and not doing, passing up some viable markets in the process.

The problem was, I didnʼt really know what low competition meant — was it the number of competing pages? was it the Page Rank of pages on the top positions? Was it the thousand other factors spouted by SEOs to determine the competition of a niche?

Personally, I see competition as a good thing — a really good thing. Competition means there is interest, and where there is interest, there is money to be made. Competition is good because it tells you what to do, and conversely, what not to do.

When you enter a niche that has competition, you have a blueprint to follow. When in doubt, just do everything your competitor does, plus a little more. 9 times out of 10 it will get you to a top spot regardless of what the latest SEO trick happens to be at the moment.

Cover Your Niche: No More, No Less

A few years ago, everyone was all about the “micro niche site” — no more than 5 pages of content, exact match domain, 1,000 exact searches a month, $1.00 CPC.

Now, the tides are slowly turning to building “authority-style” sites, 25+ pages of content, bigger niches; all supposedly because the “Panda update made micro niche sites obsolete”.

The truth is, both models work, and both models work quite well.

There are pros and cons to each model, but I have found the most important aspect in determining your success in a given niche is to become the de-facto authority on that 4 topic. What that means is that for anyone looking for information in your subject area, make sure that they will be able to find it on your site.

For some niches that task will require 1 page, for others, 100 pages.

For example, if your chosen niche was “Weight-Loss Diets for Pet Australian Sheepdogs”, one or two pages is fine. However, if your niche is “Coffee,” youʼd better have more than one page.

The important thing is to have the most complete information for that niche, relative to the other sites in that space. By becoming that resource, you will draw the links from people writing or sharing on that topic.

That is the ultimate goal to niche domination.

There Will Be Duds

Making money with AdSense, just like any business venture, is not an exact science.

The research could look good. The site could look good. The content could be great. You could rank #1.

One of the best things about the AdSense niche site business model is that you can get a site up and running in a day, and even if you outsource everything at a premium, it wonʼt cost you more that $300.

Every Niche is Different

In some niches, monetizing with AdSense is not the best option, in others it is one of the only options.

Some niches do better with a nicely designed theme, in others, the uglier the better.

There are few hard and fast rules to building out niche sites. You have to do what makes sense for your market.

Another reason having competition is beneficial, is you get to see what others have tried and get an idea of the results. If they keep doing it, it is probably working out well for them. If they stop doing it, then it probably isnʼt.

However, the only way you can truly know is from the last, but certainly one of the most important things I have learned by publishing AdSense sites.

Test And Measure Everything

The promise of the “set and forget” passive income that can be achieved with AdSense sites leads people to the false belief that they need to do something once so they can sit back and enjoy the benefits.

This idea can lead to sites taking an extremely long time to create to try to make everything perfect (as it was in my case when I first started) or for sites that dramatically under-perform from their potential.

You have the incredible ability to exercise an infinitely granular amount of control over your site and from the data you collect.

Use it to your advantage.

The goal is to get sites up, attracting traffic, and earning money as quickly as possible, even if it is incredibly small.

By getting your work out there, you have the benefit of seeing what actual visitors do on the site, and collecting real data rather than just speculating.

Even if the plan is to build an authority site in a particular niche, Iʼll start a site up with two pages of content, just to see how the traffic reacts.

From there, you will continuously test everything from ad placements to colors to content styles.

You can double earnings with small changes and doing entire site re-designs with little to no effect.

The moral here is that real data is much more value than speculation.