Making a Living Off of AdSense Part II

by Paul on February 23rd, 2005

In the first part I gave a general overview of how you should approach a site that is based solely on AdSense revenue. In this part I would like to go over the steps you can take to get started on your new AdSense site.

First let me dispel the myth that you should go looking for the highest paying keywords. This works for some people, but odds are the sharks have already taken over those words. That super keyword you thought was big money (meso*) is nothing now because so many people are covering it. Advertisers pay big bucks for those rare clicks so that is what we are looking for.

The Steps

1. Decide on the topic and find out how many times the keyword is being searched for. This is where Overture’s Search Term Tool comes in handy. Obviously the more general the term the more searches it will have.

2. Don’t focus on how much advertisers are paying for each keyword. Let’s put our focus on the variations of that search term. Write down the variations that are relevant to your term and the number of searches for that term.

Now do each of the words seperately. Rinse, wash, repeat. This is where using a spreadsheet comes in handy.

3. Go through all the keywords that are the most general to the subject that would work best as a theme. Look for themes that have quality supporting keyword phrases that use one or more terms in your main theme.

4. Now you can go see how much advertisers are paying per click (Overture only) for your main keyword themes. Write these down to give you a feel for the market.

5. Go to Google and put in some of the search terms to see how many ads are displayed and the quality of those ads. This is also a good chance to look at any affiliate opportunities if you wish to go that route as well.

6. Visit the top 10 sites for your searches and see how they are targetting your themes. You might also find some keywords that are not on your list that you should add to your spreadsheet. Some important questions to ask yourself and do research on when visiting these sites are:

How long has the site been on the Internet?
How many backlinks does it have?
How many content pages are built around the theme?
Is it quality information?
Is there anything that they are missing or not targetting?
Can you top that site?

7. This step takes some effort, but is very important. Go through the results up to 100 and find the “quality break”. What I mean is there is going to be a break in the results where things just turn nasty. The site’s content is lacking or sucks. Nothing is targetted. It’s just a mess. This should provide you with a worse case scenario for where you can land in the rankings.

8. Look at the “quality break” site and move up 5-8 positions in the rankings. How much effort would it take for you to beat out that site? Keep on going 2-4 spots in the search results till you find the point where it would take an enormous amount of effort to beat that site. Hopefully you are in the top 20.

9. Now go through the keywords and move one subtopic down. For example if want to focus on cellphones, move down to camera phones. Repeat the steps above and take note of any sites that you have seen before. You should begin to see niche sites dominating the early rankings.

10. After repeating all of this you should have a valuable list of keywords to focus on from general theme to specific subtopics. Try to build your content around the subtopics as this will generate the most traffic. With decent SEO you should find that you rank highly in the search engines and your ads should be better targetted and therefore provide a better payout.

11. Decide if it’s worth the effort.

My Thoughts

I come up with sites that cover a general topic, but have no real focus on subtopics. That was stage 1 of the whole “conquer the world plan”. The steps outlined above are part of stage 2. This takes a lot of work, but if you are in this for the money it will take this sort of effort to be successful.

A huge misconception about doing this type of work is that anyone can do it. Wrong. It takes someone with drive, passion, and patience to handle doing this kind of work, but the rewards are great.

As usual I never recommend placing all your eggs in the AdSense basket, but thinking that you can’t make much money from it is foolish.

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