Adsense niche ideas for you to steal!

In my recent exploration of the finance niche, I came cross the some interesting ideas for niches that I have never thought of. Rather than just giving you the site url, I will also try to generalise these ideas so that you know how to come out with these adsense niche ideas.

Most of the time, what we know by niche ideas are things such as 'oval coffee table' or 'student loan for mums' or 'cheap ipad case' etc. How to make these niche ideas into useful sites is a challenge. With these niche ideas that I am about to show you, they can allow you to create really useful sites, which hopefully can help us to avoid the much dreaded and hated Panda updates.

(By the way, panda 3.2 just ran on 18 Jan, 2012 but my sites were not affected so I didn't noticed)

First adsense niche idea: http://www.pennytest.com/

This is a one page site answering a single question. The key here is not to say that there is little search volume for this niche but to realise that you can build a site with one expert tip that you might have already known. You might have one nice CSS trick, or one wordpress hack or one knitting tip or one gardening advice. This can be the basis of your one page site. If you build such a site, there will be nothing spammy about the site because the tip will be something that is useful and relevant.

Second adsense niche idea: http://freetickettojapan.com/

This niche idea is about turning your goals into a niche site. The author of this site wanted to hunt for a free air ticket to Japan and so she blogged about her attempts at doing so. I think this is a great idea! Why not think about all the goals that you want to achieve such as buying a second house, getting a sports cars, live in a beach home etc and create a niche blog about it. I am sure the content will be interesting and you should be able to promote it more easily as well.

Third adsense niche idea: http://whatisdividend.com/

I like this niche idea because it shows how you can enter a competitive market such as finance if you use a classic market segmentation strategy to identify poor served markets. In this case, the author have segment the market by investment instruments and then by types of audience. This site is not about investing. It is not about dividend investing. It is about dividend investing for beginners.

Once you have segment such a market out, it is easier to create useful content like what the site has done. It is a niche site but is a site that I find useful when I was searching info about dividend investing.

Most of the time, we don't think of niches in this way. We just use a keyword tool to come out with the idea for the site. However, you should combine the keyword approach and the market segment approach to craft a unique selling proposition for your niche site. It will make it easier for you to create the content and to structure your onsite navigation.

If you think such a post is useful, I can turn it into a regular feature here on aaronchua.com.

Thanks for reading my rants on how to make money online!

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SEO metrics to track for making money

A big part of why so many people failed to make money online is not knowing which part of the equation did they get wrong. Besides visitors and revenue, I don't see much discussion on what other metrics or indicators a beginner should track to assess their performance. It is easy to say: "just do all the work and you will make money eventually. Behind this statement is the implicit assumption that you will learn your mistakes, correct them and then become successful. However, without seeing any positive results, it is hard to keep going to realise this learning cycle.

In this short post, I am going to talk about two important SEO metrics you should use to track your progress as you learn how to make money with amazon or any other niche sites. This post is not meant for those who want to build authority sites. It is targeted at those who are starting out, learning to build a few mini sites and wants to know whether they are on the right track. As I said in my post on one vs many sites to make money, you need to know your market first before going in 100% to build a large site.

Let's get on with the program.

Making money with amazon boils down to a couple of steps:

• Finding low competition keywords that can monetise well
• Laying out your site and content to maximise conversion (not the expense of the user though)
  
• Increasing the traffic from search engines to your site

It sounds simple enough but there is a lot of details within each of the steps. The last metric is easy to track and one that I will not talk about. The first two steps, however can be cruical during the early stages of your niche site building.


Picking low competition keywords
Learning how to pick low competition keywords will solve half of your problems in making money. If you don't get this part down, you will find it hard to draw traffic later on to monetise your site. To master this aspect, you need to know two things:

• Where to find seed ideas that have no competition: I have said this many times but you need to know how to look at a keyword and research on whether there are new products or markets within that niche. Don't just reply on google adwords because the fact that the keywords appear in the tool means somebody might already be competiting with you on that keywords. Learn to expand your source for seed ideas and you will see that opportunity is all around you. 

• How to evaluate the keyword competitiveness of your niche: I covered this in my post on how to check keyword competition. Check that out. 

How do you know you got this part right?

First metric to track is how well you indexed. If your site indexed on page 1-3 without any serious backlink effort, you are picking the right low competition keywords. If most of your sites don't ranked well when they are first indexed. you are probably picking something that is too competitive for a niche site.


Laying out your site
Once you have the keywords and they ranked well when indexed, you need to learn how to layout your site. No point getting your site ranked well when the visitors are not clicking on your amazon clicks. The first rule of thumb is not to layout your site like a blog. Your amazon sites should look like ecommerce stores. Your visitor's first impression should be that this is a site where I can browse for the products that I am searching for. I will give concrete examples in my future post on this topic.


To know if you are laying out your site correctly, track your visitors to amazon clicks ratios. Anything less than 50% should be improved. Believe me when I say that it is easier to improve your conversion ratio than to get more visitors to your site. Maximise each and every visitor so you do less work in terms of traffic generation.


In summary, these are the metrics you should track when you have very little revenue or traffic:

• How highly ranked are your sites when they first index
• What is the ratio between your visitors and those that click on the amazon link

They will help you to know whether you are on the right track when starting out. Try not to build too many sites until you get these two metrics right with the first few that you have.

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How to find long tail keywords using software

Finding long tail keywords can help you to bring in more search engine traffic. In fact, some online marketers are especially good at finding long tail keywords and writing them naturally into their content. This is the kind of advance keyword research that you must be good at if you want to learn how to make money online.

For those who have been following my blog, I use free tools as much as I can. However, I recently bought a long tail keyword generator called keywordsearcher after reading a recommendation online and I really love it! This is because what the tool does is what I have been doing, but it automates the keyword mining task for me so it saves me a lot of time!

What I used to do manually when I want to find long tail keywords is to go to Google Serach Bar and use its auto complete function to get all the juicy buying keywords that nobody is targeting.  For example, one buying keyword I was targeting is buy laptops. However, I don't want to waste time competing for this high traffic but competitive keyword. So, what I did was to use Google Suggest and do the following:

Type "buy a laptop" and get the following results:

Then type "buy b laptop" and get the following results:

 

So, I have to do this for letter A-Z. You can see how time consuming this process is. Using such a way to find long tail buying keywords is not a secret but the process makes it hard to scale. 

What this new tool does is to scrap these keywords for you. All you need to do is to type in "buy * laptop" and you will get this without doing any more work:

I like it because it automates a keyword process that I have been doing anyway. However it is not a magic cure for your make money activities. If you don't know what are buying keywords, this tool will not help you in any way. 

What I have so far is to use this tool to get the list of long tail buying keywords and export them to check if an exact name domain (EDM) was available. This makes it easy to rank for terms that are likely to convert to buyers. In fact, I will create some sites based on this tool and see if I can earn the its cost back, which should be very easy as it is priced below USD30 only.

Do check the tool out. If you decide to buy it and want to buy through my affiliate link here, I can get you to brainstorm some seed buying keywords to get you started. 

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How to find low competition keywords

The easiest way to find low competition keywords is to know how to find trending keywords or new keywords of products that are just coming into the market. I have repeated this many times in my posts but I realise a concrete example might be needed to show what I really mean. So, in this post, I will talk about finding low competition keywords by learning how to spot new markets and going through some thinking process to get easy keywords from them.

The first thing you need to do when picking any niches is to look for new markets or products. There are a couple of ways to do it but generally you need to listen to news or to use Google News in your market research stage. This stage is hard for me to put out any concrete ideas because finding seed keywords is about keeping your ears and eyes open to new ideas. Of course, you can increase your chance if you read more from technology and trend sites but sometimes, luck plays a part as well.

Anyway, one of the biggest thing you must know about is the iPad. Let take this as a seed keyword. It is perfect example of a popular product being introduced into the market and creates opportunities to mine low competition keywords related to this new niche.

For ipad, the market we targeting is the tablet market. Do not target the ipad name itself. Always aim for the product category that it is in. Once we know the seed keyword is tablet, it is time to drill into the market to find those low competition keywords.

First thing is to ignore the google keyword tool. That is always the first destination for every IM folks and believe me when I say almost all the longtail keywords that appear in the tool when you type in tablet will be targeted by other IMmers. See the list below for keywords to avoid!!

click to enlarge

Since you cannot use google keyword tool, what do you use? How about the thing between your ears? : )

Learn how to take that seed keyword and segment it according to different customer types.

Here are a few examples:

Customers who are on a budget or going for deals: Tablet under XX price, tablet deals, tablet for cheap....

Customers who use tablets for only certain functions: Gaming tablet,   kids tablet.....

Customers who have design preference: White tablet,  7 inch tablet....

The important lesson here is to use your brain a bit more and the keyword tool a bit less. Once you have the above longer tail keywords, put them into the keyword tool to see what kind of traffic they have. If you don't do a bit of brainstorming, it will be hard to come up with long tail keywords that are not attacked by everyone else using the google keyword tool.

If you see the numbers are small, try using a similar product category that has a good history. In the case of the tablet, I might use laptops as a proxy. So, I will key in keywords such as laptops under 200 to see what kind of volume they have relative to the keyword volume for the single generic keyword, 'laptop'. This ratio can help you to know how big your potential market is if the new market to grow and expand.

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How to choose amazon keywords

As part of my 50 amazon niche sites project, I am literally spending hours doing product research on amazon to uncover good products to promote. Since some of you might also be trying to find good amazon keywords to promote, I thought I will share how I am doing it.

Before I begin, let me state that there is no one way of doing it. This is just my way. I am sure there are other ways that people have found success with as well.

Let's go through the basics

• Expensive products with good reviews: I choose products above USD100 and have at least 5 good reviews. This is quite common advice among many amazon affiliates. There will be some that says you should also sell some cheap but high volume products to bump up your commission rate. I don't disagree with that as well. 

• Sufficient search volume: I target amazon keywords that have about 1500 monthly search from all the long tail keywords combined, not just on one keyword. As I said, my approach to SEO now is not to hammer many links at one keyword and hope that it will rank. I write comprehensive ad copy that targets many different keyword expressions. Linking building is a not the best use of your resources. Think about that for a while. 

So, the above are the basics and the easiest part of finding good amazon keywords. The next part is what will make or break your success.

How competitive are these amazon keywords that you have choose.

Judging competitiveness of keywords is an art, rather than an exact science. There are some who say it is easy to outrank amazon pages and others who say it is virtually impossible. So who is right? The answer is: it depends.

SEO comes down to onpage and off page optimisation.

For onpage optimisation, you can use search engine operators such as intitle, inurl, intext etc to know whether an amazon page has been well optimised. The trick here is to avoid directly competing in keywords that amazon pages are well optimised for.

Keywords expressions can be varied and ever changing. If you are targeting "ballet shoes for kids" and found that amazon pages use this phase in their page titles, urls and text, why not target "kids ballet shoes"? This avoid any unnecessary direct competition. Remember, 20-25% of all keywords are new so that there are always new ways of searching for the same thing.


For offsite optimisation, amazon doesn't directly build links but there are other 2 indirect ways that are attracting links to these amazon pages.

• inner links
• links from other amazon affiiates that are promoting that particular product

These 2 types of links at their strongest for best seller products. Think about it. If a product is a best seller, it will receive inner links from amazon's best seller list as well as  promotional links on the pages of other relevant products.  All these inner links will make outranking the amazon page a much tougher task.

Besides inner links, a best seller product tend to be well promoted by other amazon affiliates since everyone has been taught to do keyword research using this list. Some of these affiliate might not have 'nofollow' tags on their affiliate links, thus passing PR and link juice to these amazon pages and strengthening them in the process.

To avoid the above possibility, the best way is NOT to promote a product from the best seller list. Instead, go really deep and try to dig out products that meet the first two criteria but are not on any list. This is how to maximise your chances of outranking amazon for the product that you are trying to promote.

So, do I make sense? I am not sure but at least this is how I pick my amazon keywords.

Next post will be my progress on the 50 amazon niche sites project.

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Buying keywords for beginners

I have not updated this blog because I am been working hard at building my niche blogs and making money. It has been a very rewarding experience to apply all the SEO tips that I have learned to make a real living. However, this is not instant wealth. Don't expect to create one blog and expect to quit your job. It wouldn't happen that way. Making money online using niche blogs is a long process. Give yourself a year and tw0(plus constant hard work) and you will have a passive income stream that can then allow you to quit your job and do what you really.

A year or two of hardwork is not actually that long. Most of us have worked for 5 years or more and we are still stuck in the same 9-5 working conditions. However, we don't complain about working for 5 years. Relative to that, 1-2 years is nothing because the rewards at the end of the day is so much richer. My plan is to have enough passive income to travel the world for almost everyday of my life. Because I can work anywhere with my niche blogs, I can practically work from any country. Even if I don't work at all, it will be ok because I have the passive income coming in. That is my end goal and that is why I am motivated to do this.

When you first start out as I have, the beginning is always the most difficult. The income you get is so small that you will think whether this is worth it. My first month adsense earning is only $15. Well, that wouldn't get anybody excited and this is why most people will fail. They can't see the long term potential of that USD$15. My second month is around USD$50. Again, not exciting but the growth is there. I break theUSD $100 mark in my third month and things got really interesting. I am now at the 6th month and I am on track to break the USD$1000 a month mark. That is my aim for this year and to break the USD$5000 a month by next year. Based on my current progress, this is certainty doable if you put enough hard work into it.

Making money using adsense is not rocket science. You just need to

(i) select good keywords which can produce profits,
(ii) create keyword relevant content on free platforms such as Blogspot, Blogetery, Blogpico or your own self hosted blogs, and
(iii) the most important part, getting anchored backlinks to your site using a variety of varied phases relating to your keywords.

If you do the above, your site will be ranked on the first page of Google and you will received targeted traffic that will click on your adsense because they are relevant to the searcher. Once that happens, you make money.

However, getting the anchored backlinks is the most difficult because as a beginner, we don't have a lot of resources to place our links. Therefore, we need to think of out the box and figure out niches that our site can get to the top page without that many backlinks. To do that, I have 2 tips for you.

The first is to buy domains containing the exact keyword phase. Domains carry quite a bit of SEO juice so they can rank out of the box if the competition is not strong. If you select keywords that are typically three letter long and the result pages in Google showing 100,000 or less, the chances of that domain ranking for its keyword is very high. This is my current strategy and I am using it to create 100 micro sites. I called this my microsite challenge and I intend to finish it by end of May. With 100 microsites making roughly $10-$40 per month, you are looking at USD$1000-USD$4000 a month, a full time income right there.

I will detailing this challenge in my future posts. So far, the learnings have been great from creating these sites and I can't wait to share them here.

The second tip is to look for keywords that have no authority sites for them. What are authority sites? These are sites that Google trust and you will find that there will be 1-2 for these for any 2 word common keywords. Take window blinds for example. There will be ecommerce store selling blinds that have around since 2000 and these site, due to the age, will have a lot of trust in Google's eyes. Trying to outrank them is possible if they don't have a lot of anchored backlinks but it will take a while and most beginners don't have patience or confidence for this.

The tip is then is to look for new keywords that have no authority sites. Where to find them? Look for trends and events. One good example is movies. There are always new movies so the title of the movies are new keywords that have no authority sites. A personal example is New Moon. This is the title for the second saga for the popular Twilight series. This word is new and there were no authority for it. I created a blog around a merchandise item around New Moon and got ranked on the first page within 3 weeks with only 3 backlinks. This 2 post blog made me a few hundred dollars a month during Nov and Dec.

While the earnings have tailored off, it still gets a constant traffic. Even if the earnings stopped, so wait., I have earned the money and I now have a blog ranking on page one of Google for its keyword that I can use for backlinking.

So, look for trends and spot keywords because they are easy to rank for beginners. However, do try to pick out buying keywords. Going back to the Twilight example. Ranking for something New Moon trailer might get you lots of traffic but the clicks will have low paying ads because the searchers do not really want to buy anything. When going back such niches, think of the product side. What kind of merchandise will fans of the movies looking for. These product related keywords are definitely buying keywords and will tend to have more clicks and higher paying ads.

If we continue the movie example, I will then look for what will be the hottest say, kids animation movies for 2010. I will do a little research to see which one of these titles have an existing fan base and will then select my keywords accordingly. For kids animation, things like coloring book, songtrack, toys, action figures etc are good buying keywords that you can tag below the name of the movie like this example: diary of a wimpy kid coloring book, or how to train your dragon toys.

Of course, besides movies, there are other types of niches that has new keywords with no authority. Look out for new product launches. Products can be in home applicanes like the new bladeless electric fan or they can be services like new type of cosmestic surgery. All these type of niches are easy to rank for. Of course, some will turn out to be duds but if you build on free blogspots, where is the cost?

I hope this post on selecting buying keywords for beginners has been useful.

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How to select good keywords for niche blogs

To make money online, there is two main things you need to do: picking good keywords and using keyword anchored links to get your site rank high in Google. This is as basic as it gets and anybody that follows this strategy will be able to make money within 2 months.

As an illustration, let me show you a niche of mine that I started in November. Using the tip to get index fast, I manage to get the blog to be indexed within 1 day. After which, it is a matter of selecting long tail keywords that are contains your main keyword and getting them ranked by using keyword anchored backlinks. Because I was able to rank for long tails, traffic begin to come in after one week. I slapped on Adsense after 2 weeks and in the month of November, this is my income for this new blog.













Earning around $5 is no big deal. What I did then was to look at the keywords that were bringing me traffic. I then create a post that targets each of the long tail keyword and build a couple of backlinks to each post. After a month, these long tail keywords begin to rank and my traffic increase. As a result, my income for December for this blog increase as well.














The best thing about this niche is the CTR. I got around 20% , meaning out of every 10 visitors, 2 would click on an ad. The price of the ad is also high, ranging from 80 cents to over a dollar. I will definitely break the $15 a month while my main keywords is not even on page one on Google yet. I can imagine that if my main keyword goes on to page one, my income for this blog will across a hundred bucks a month. Not bad for a free hosted blog.

$15 a month of course is not something to brag about. However imagine if I multiple this blog by 100 or 200. That would bring me about $1500 to $3000 per month of passive income. That, my friend, is what making money online is all about. You pick niches that you can rank given your current resources and you duplicate your success by 100 or 200 blogs.

So, what kind of keywords are good for beginners? This is my general guideline. I pick buying keywords. These keywords contain buying intentions such as affordable, cheap, inexpensive. They signal a strong buying intend from the searcher. Next, I choose ncihes that don't have much competition. I pick niches that have less than 100,000 competing sites. I also look out for niches that have lots of ezine articles or other article directories in the top 10 results. This means you can easily take the page one position with a few anchored backlinks.

When I say anchored backlinks, I doesn't mean links from commenting or bookmarking. I mean links that are found within the content of an relevant article. This is the best form of backlinks and is the hardest to get. As a beginner, if you pick a low competition keyword, you can do the following:

- set up a few hosted blogs on blogger, wordpress, typepad, squidoo that are long tails of your your niche. Make sure they are indexed and then point a link back to your main site
- submit a few articles to high PR article directories such as Ezine, Info barrel, Hub pages etc again point a few links back to your site.

Make sure you vary your anchor text. For example, if you are trying to rank for the keyword: used electric wheelchairs, you should embed the following as your long tail keyword:
- where to buy used electric wheelchair
- used electric wheelchair under $500
- acorn used electric wheelstair

These will ensure that your long tails will start to rank and you will see long tail traffic coming in. From my experience, it is almost impossible to rank for your main keyword. It is the long tail keywords that will bring in traffic first. Also, ranking well for your long tails will help your main keywords to rank if your long tail contains your main keyword.

In summary, to make money online, you need to pick buying keywords for niches that have low competition. Then, source for some anchored backlinks using means that any beginner can get. Within a few weeks, you can start to see income coming in.

This is all I have for how to select good keywords for niche blogs.

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SEO tips: search traffic vs social traffic

The SEO tip for today will on why you want search traffic, rather than social traffic. I have intentionally stop posting to see what happens to this site, which is primarily based on social traffic. I used to get traffic from ycombinator, facebook, twitter, commenting etc. All these are social traffic. The diagram below shows the results.





From a daily visitorship of 100 readers, my blog went to almost zero when I stopped posting. That is the greatest disadvantage of social traffic. You need to post everyday just to keep the traffic coming.

Some of you might notice the spike I had experienced towards the past few days. This is because of the new posts I have created on SEO tips. That is when I started to SEO this blog. I begin to select the keywords I used very carefully (i.e SEO tips, keyword research, backlinks etc). All these are keywords that I am trying to rank for.

It has taken a couple of weeks but I think the big G has finally begin to recognise this shift and has begin ranking me for many of these new keywords. Here is a sample of the keywords that I am ranking for i.e. in the top page of Google. Just type these in to see if I am on the top page.

anchored keywords
percentage of traffic in top 3 of google pages
good keywords for seo
how to get new post indexed fast

These are the keywords that bought me traffic for the past few days even though I have not been posting. This is search traffic.

Finally, good to see that I am ranking for my blog's title as well. : )

seo for niche blogs

I have not been building backlinks so the ranking must come from the authority that this site has accrued over the years and the fact that I am doing on page SEO. However, if any of you wanted to help me rank higher, I will appreciate if you can linked to this blog using the following keywords, rather than my name : )

keyword
keyword research
SEO

Before I go, one last evidence to proof that search traffic is much more desirable than social traffic. The diagram below shows one of my niche blogs that I have not posted in months.






Even if no posting, the traffic is slowly but surely increasing. That is the power of search traffic. If you build enough backlinks, these backlinks will aged over time and give you more authority on the keyword you are trying to rank for. The older the site, the more search traffic you will get if you do your SEO right.

PS: I will not be showing my niche blogs in this site anymore. Some bastards have been flagging them and causing me headaches. My intention was to show how SEO can be done by examples but it is not worth the effort.

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