How to Make Money with Adsense Websites: Keyword Selection Process

I get a lot of questions on how exactly I make money with Adsense niche sites so I thought I’d write down how to select profitable Adsense keywords once and for all.

I always contend that making money online is something everyone can learn but it does take a lot of patience and work. The barrier to entry in this business is very low. In fact, if you’re tight for money, you can find free hosting and not pay a cent towards the development of the business. It might take you awhile to succeed but you can still make money with Adsense.

What is the Adsense Program?

The first step to making money with Adsense is to understand what it is. Adsense is Google’s ad serving program for publishers (website owners) to make money. The website owners sign up for this program and put placeholder code from Google on the pages of their website as to where the ads can go. These ads come from Google’s advertising program called Adwords where advertisers pay to get their ads placed on websites. Google will then serve up the ads in their publisher’s inventory based on the page’s content. Obviously, it will try to choose ads as relevant to the content as possible. Therefore, if your page is talking about women’s shoes, Google ads might show Jimmy Choo ads.

Why Personal Blogs Don’t Make Money With Adsense

A lot of people have personal blogs and then they slap on Adsense and wonder why they aren’t getting clicks. These idiots give Adsense a bad name.

First off, personal blogs are personal. You’re probably blogging for the benefit of your friends and family. Those people don’t click or if they do click, they click like crazy thinking they are doing you a favor…  They can get your Adsense account banned and you don’t want that to happen. It’s a bitch to get back. Second of all, a personal blog might range on a variety of topics. Without understanding what the post is truly about, the Google ads might not be relevant so users won’t be interested in clicking. Thirdly, it is hard to get individual posts of personal blogs talking about this and that ranked on Google’s search engines. Without search engine traffic, your friends and family are probably the only ones reading your blog.

How to Get Search Engine Traffic

I like search engine traffic because it lends itself very well with Adsense monetization. If you can get your website to rank well for a particular keyword or phrase, then you can get a constant source of traffic. And if the searchers don’t find whatever they are looking for on your website, then they might be inclined to click on ads to find the answer to continue their search. Clicks = money.

At this point, little bells should be going off in your head asking what exactly are people searching for and how much money you can make. After all, if your purpose is to make money with Adsense, you want to take a mercenary approach and skip dead end activities such as writing for non-income producing niche topics. Forget about being passionate about a topic, blah blah blah. If you want to be creative then go write a book. What people want (search for) are answers to their everyday problems such as getting rid of a pest in their house. While trying to get rid of a cockroach infestation in their house which your website explains, they might click an ad for a local exterminator because they just don’t want to deal with the problem anymore.  These topics won’t set the world on fire but the key to get search engine traffic is to write about something useful.

How to Find Income Producing Adsense Keywords

What people type in Google is called keywords. While it is all well and good to write something useful for search engine traffic, you also want to make sure that advertisers are paying well for these keywords for the potential traffic you can divert to them based on the clicks. The good news is that that Google has just the tool that gives up this information. Here is the keyword tool.

In this keyword tool, just start off by typing whatever comes to your mind. Check “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”.   In the Advanced Options, I check United States.  Type in the CAPTCHA (the letters to manually distinguish you from a robot) and press Search.  Over to the right hand side, press the Columns button. Check only the Global Monthly Searches and Estimated Average CPC.   Once you do that, over on the left hand navigation, under Match Type, check Exact Matches.

Once you have done all that, let’s do some math. Simple math dictates that by multiplying the number of global searches by the cost per click, you’ll get the approximate income potential of a certain keyword each month.

However, there is no guarantee that you’ll get all of this money even if you rank number one for this keyword. How many times have you surfed the net and bypassed the top ranked site because the title and the little blurb site description did not really match what you were looking for? For this reason, the internet marketing industry speculates that only 40% of people click on the top site. Furthermore, just because someone clicks on your site, they might not necessarily click on any ads. We make estimates that only 5% will click on the ads. Finally, Google has to make money too and it retains the best performing ads for itself so only expect 25 68% after Google takes its cut (Google recently released Adsense revenue share percentage and they in fact pay 68% to its publishers. Is this data accurate?  Who knows but it’s the best information we have including their estimation of global searches).  Therefore, if we want to calculate the income potential of a keyword, the formula is number of global searches * CPC * 0.4 * 0.05 * 0.25 0.68

Understanding what to write based on the income potential of a keyword is only half the battle. The other half is based on whether or not you can actually rank for the keyword. Obviously, you would expect that the higher paying keywords would be very tough competition.

How to Figure Out Competition and Rank for Adsense Keywords

I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffett in real life. Even though the guy’s a billionaire investor, in all his interviews and letters to shareholders, he comes across as a very unassuming guy. He explains things in a very simple manner and I guess that’s how making money online should be as well.

I think that picking stocks and picking keywords are very similar. You’re looking at hidden gems in unsaturated niches as opposed to competitive niches like weight loss, credit cards, acne, debt, and all these other played out topics. The payout in these niches are huge but so is the competition. Seasoned Internet marketers have tons of ressources at their disposal to rank these sites so newbies should be aware when they are first starting out.

One of the things I like about Warren Buffett is his cigarette butt approach to investing. It can be explained like this: “If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the “cigar-butt” approach to investing. A cigar butt found in the street, which has only one puff left in it, may not offer much of a smoke, but the bargain purchase will make that puff all profit”.

I know I’m digressing with the Warren Buffett stock picks analogy but this ties together with how I pick Adsense keywords. When you calculate the keyword potential for the month, you have to ask yourself whether $20 per month a site is worth the effort. Would $30 be worth it? It would depend on the competition obviously but with enough of these $20 to $30 per month websites, it could add up. The amount of work you put into the site to rank it to the top is called sweat equity. Or you could hire someone else to do it for you. The bottom line is that you want the effort to rank the site to be as low as possible to justify the low potential of the site but it still will make you a profit month after month.

And after saying all that, if you are happy with the Adsense potential of what a site based on the keyword can generate, the next step is to evalutate the competition. Can you easily rank a keyword on Google?

If you are using Firefox, you need to download the plugin SEO Quake for Firefox. If you’re using Chrome, you need to download the same extension but for Chrome. And no one cares about the other browsers.

Turn on the plugin or extension if you haven’t already done so. When you type in a keyword, information about each of the results will appear. Things like the Page Rank (PR) of the page, how many links pointed to the particular page and domain according to Yahoo. Now, no-one knows why Google ranks a page/site for sure since there are over 200 signals but Page Rank is one, and so are links. For a newbie, I don’t want to see the top 5 result having anything above a PR 3. If I see a page/site that has a keyword above 3, I give up on the keyword. There are millions of keywords out there and I don’t want to waste my time and effort on something that doesn’t make me money within a three or four months.

The above criteria is largely based on the Keyword Academy which is a membership site for people who want to make money online.  I highly recommend this site but I have even more stringent things I look for when picking Adsense Keywords (they have a $50 keyword minimum and a top 4 review for PR 4 sites with no exact keyword match in the title).  Other things I added are below:

If it passes the Page Rank test, the next step is I look at the links pointing to the site. Google treats each link as a vote for the credibility of the site so the more links, the more credible the site should be. This is a gross simplification but that’s all I want to say for now.

Google itself has a command in which you type link:domain.com and it will show you the links pointing to the site. However, it really doesn’t show you a true representation of how many links are actually pointed to it so we (or SEO Quake) uses Yahoo links. Yahoo is not infallible either so I’m looking at links to the page at less than 100 and links to the domain at less than 500. This is not a hard and fast rule as sometimes there can be huge sites like a Yahoo Store, or Amazon that are within the top 5 and will have a million links to their domain. However, most of these are not anchored to the keyword so I’ll still go for the keyword. The bottom line though is that less is better because I generally think that Yahoo is miscounting as well and I conservatively estimate that for me to beat a particular page, I’ll need to generate 5 times more links than what Yahoo is reporting.

The other information I find interesting in SEO Quake is the Google Index which is a count of how big my competitors’ sites are.  For this, the lower the number the better.  Again, there are no hard and fast rules but for a niche site, I don’t want to compete for anything largely over 100 indexed pages from the top ranked  competitor.  It really depends on if my competitors site is intensely nichey like I want my site to be or if the site is about a variety of things.  That’s why I also take a look at the SEMRush link to see if the words they are ranking for is highly concentrated based on keyword variances.  I know with SEMRush you have to pay more to see the whole list but what they do show will give you a good idea.

Another thing I’ll do to guage competition is to put my keywords in quotes in Google’s search bar. I don’t expect searchers to actually type in their keyword with quotes but if I make my site very specific to that keyword, then Google has no choice but to rank me the most relevent page/site instead of other pages that might talk about the keyword in broad terms. I’m looking for a keyword that has less than 50000 total search results with quotes.

The stuff I added beyond the Keyword Academy I don’t really necessarily follow myself all the time.  It’s just a mental survey of how hard the competition is.  Sometimes PR 3 sites can be very misleading because it can turn out that they’ve been around a long time, have lots of links coming to it, etc.  I really wouldn’t want to waste my time if I’m going to be competing with these sites.  I want to create enough sites that beat the smaller competition so I can reinvest in the business to go against the harder sites.

This has been a very long winded post about how to make money with Adsense niches but I want to make it crystal clear that for someone to have success with Adsense, it all comes down to picking the right income producing keyword with competition you know you can beat. A lot of people who don’t understand Adsense say it doesn’t work but this how Google makes its money and we know how successful Google is. If advertisers aren’t happy with the traffic they are getting, then they wouldn’t advertise.

For Adsense to work, you must be able to write tight keyword relevant content 1) so Google serves you the correct ads 2) to insure the searchers are interested parties going to the adversiting site instead of riff raff surfers.

So for newbies, I hope this has explained how to find profitable Adsense keywords and in the next post, I’ll explain how to create Adsense niche sites.

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