There is a lot of misconception about
Google AdSense; many marketers
see it as one of the most rudimentary ways to
monetize your site. As
such many markets prefer to build affiliate sites, spend an age writing
sales driven content, building email lists to try and sell on the back
end, but the most important aspect of getting the sale is completely
taking out of their hands, once you send traffic to the merchant they
are the ones you have to rely on to push your
traffic through their
checkout page. If the merchant you are promoting has a poor sales funnel
you will suffer.
This is not the case with AdSense, once you get the click then your job is done and your money is in the bank of
Google.
When you build a site around AdSense in many ways it’s different to
that of an
affiliate site. The perfect traffic for an AdSense site is
click happy information hungry searchers. This is not the case for an
affiliate site, most
affiliates will target traffic that are close to
making a purchase and hopefully they are just looking for some final
reassurances that the product they plan to buy will meet their needs.
These typical searches can include “reviews” “best price” or one of
favourites is “warranty” for instance how long is the warranty on a Sony
camcorder. As you can imagine these keywords get a tiny amount of
searches every month but they are super targeted and can lead to the
highest conversions.
If you target these types of searches with an AdSense site you may
not get enough traffic to make the site pay and as the searchers have a
very specific goal you will often find that they are unwilling to click
on your ad.
Choosing your keywords and finding a click happy market
The most important thing to remember about an AdSense site is that
it’s a numbers game, in every part of it you want to have the numbers on
your side, ideally the more the better.
Keeping the numbers on your side starts with the keyword research, you
want to try and find between 5 and 10 possible candidates. The same
rules apply as always, use Google’s keyword tool, try and find keywords
with a minimum of 2500 searches and months, with a
CPC of at least .50
cents ( remember this is split between you again Google, 60:40 in your
favour). If you have tools like Market Samurai or Micro Niche finder,
use them! they will make this process so much easier
Now to find if any of these keywords have click happy searchers
Knowing that you are entering a market that has potential to be
profitable for you is a great incentive to drive on and make it work. To
try and take as much guess work out of this as possible you will need
to do quite a lot of ground work. You may be putting a lot of work in
now with little reward, but it’s better to do it now than to spend 6
months working on a site with little or nothing to show at the end.
The best way I have found to test the potential of a new niche is to
write an article on all of your chosen keywords and submit them to
ezinearticles. (Note: as we have not registered any domains yet, you
will need to link your biobox to some
other site), It may sound strange
to be doing this but there is
method in the madness and there are 2 good
reasons, firstly ezinearticles has the ability to rank highly for your
keyword, giving you an indication of how tough the competition is and
after about a month you will have an idea of which keyword has the best
potential. Just look for the article that has the highest CTR (click
through rate). Because they have clicked your link, they are hungry to
learn more and are willing to click on your link.
Building Your Site
Now it’s back to the numbers game, you need as many articles as
possible for your new site, more articles means more searchers which
will mean more clicks. Each article you write should back up the main
theme of your site but focus on a slightly different key phrase.
Another important aspect of the articles you write is to try and build
in some relative or related keywords into each article, doing this will
give you a better chance of attracting more long tail searches. If your
site is about remote control helicopters, try to work in some brand
names, “how to fix” or any keywords that would make sense, a lot of
information based searches are based around asking a question like “how
do I fix my broken Helicopter” if you can build this into your copy you
will have a great chance of ranking for these types of searches. In most
cases when you write the article you will be doing this anyway, this
technique is commonly known as LSI or latent semantic indexing.
The length of the article will really depend on your own preferences
but I prefer to write pretty meaty articles, anything up to 1500 words. I
do this for 2 reasons, I can easily target a lot more potential long
tails and I can hit the reader with 3 different ad boxes as they scroll
down the page. Getting ads clicked in the very top ad box will usually
yield the biggest CPC, but if you miss your chance here, hitting them a
second and third time will treble your chances of getting your ad
clicked.
Link building
The same rules apply here, but there is one thing I have found with
my AdSense sites and that is they can attract natural links more easily.
I think in part it’s because of the articles I write help to answer a
question but also, AdSense sites are less conspicuous compared to
affiliates sites and people are more willing to link to them.
AdSense is really underrated as a viable way to monetize your site, I
believe many people turn to it as a last option when all their
affiliate offers fail and because the site was not built for AdSense
most times these sites will under preform leaving the owner bemused with
the miserable amount of
money they are making.
