Flat Stomachs and Niche Inspector Niches
In my last post, I outlined how one of the first websites I created at www.businesssoftwareresource.com failed to generate the $10 a day in adsense revenue I was looking for. However, despite its failure, it did provide me with some interesting clues as to how I might be able to use Niche Inspector to create a site that will work. What did I learn for next time? Well, let’s see …
1. First of all, whatever Niche I choose will have to have more than 1800 searches per month. This is simply not enough traffic to make it worthwhile. I’m going to want something that is greater than 6000, I think.
2. I’ll be looking for niches with adwords bids in the $3 to $8 dollar range.
3. I’m going to check and see what the competition is for the niche that I select. Ideally, it would be nice to be on the first page, but I’d be willing to drop to the second, if need be.
4. For the design of the site, I’m going to want to really blend the adsense links in with the general links. When I created www.businesssoftwareresource, I tried to do this. If you check out the site, you’ll see that the menus on the top, right, and bottom look very similar to the links on the left. However, I think I can do better. Check out this site : http://www.flatstomachtips.com/ . I didn’t create this site, but I think it’s a great example of how an adsense site should be created. Notice how she has links within her text to other areas of her site? This matches the blue google ad links within her site. I think it works really well. I’m very curious as to how well she’s doing with it.
Ok, based on the above, let’s fire up Niche Inspector and analyze it in an effort to find a profitable niche for me. The first one I’m going to try is VENICE. Traveling is popular, and Venice is as good as any. When I perform this search, the only keyword phrase that really stands out is Venice Hotel. Here’s the breakdown:
Searches: 6564
Google: 474,000
Google ads: 18
Broad Match CPC $3.10 - $3.87
Well, this actually looks promising. Plus, I bet I could find some affiliate deals with it. Let’s look it up in Google to scope out the competition.
When I look up Venice Hotel in Google, the first thing I notice is that most of the sites are very related to my targeted keyword, which is “Venice Hotel”. The only exception to this is www.venetian.com, which is a Las Vegas Hotel. Ideally, it would be great if sites came up that were not really related to Venice Hotels at all. However, as it is obvious that Hotels and Travel are popular, this is not surprising.
Next, let’s try and determine the authority of these sites in order to determine what it would take to beat them. To do this, I’m going to use Yahoo! Site Explorer, which you can find at :
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
I’m going to type in one of the results that appear towards the bottom of the list. This is
http://www.hotelinvenice.com/
According to Site Explorer, this site has 86 indexed pages. Hmmmm, this actually isn’t too bad, I suspect. I’ve seen some sites with 100,000+ indexed pages. Again, I’m new to this, but this doesn’t look too bad. Next, let’s check out the number of back links, which is 1,823. This is also quite a low number, I think. I’ve seen some sites with back links in the 19100 range. Numbers don’t account for everything, however. There is also the quality of those links. Most of the links here come from other hotels, so they are related to the content. This makes them high quality (no blogger account spamming here).
Another thing to look at is the age of the website itself. Terrible 10 year old websites can often outrank well designed, content rich websites 1 year old websites. Website age is very important. To find this out, I like to use this SEO for firefox tool. You can download it here:
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
By clicking on it when you’re looking at google search results, a whole bunch of valuable information is displayed. For Age, we are taken to the Internet Wayback Machine (see my previous post on this, John Chow and the Amazing Internet Wayback machine). From here, we learn that this page has been in operation since 2000, which is a long time in Internet terms.
Ok, so what does all of this mean? I suspect I could create a pretty good site for Venice. I bet it would perform better than my business software resource site. However, ideally I would like to find a niche in which I think I could get on the first page for whatever keyword phrase I’m basing my site on. For Venice Hotels, this might be difficult. I would be hoping that people would find my site based on search phrases other than “Venice Hotel”. I’m going to file “Venice Hotel” away for now, and keep looking. Let’s see what else is out there …
In my next blog post, I intend to explore a few more potential adsense niches. How will these compare to “Venice Hotels”? Tune in tomorrow to find out. Also, if you have any comments on the above based on your experience, I’d love to hear from you.
To Our Success,
- Dave
