Choosing a Profitable Niche

Minggu, 01 Februari 2009

Q. How do you decide what profitable niches to
build your AdSense sites about?


It might seem weird, but at first I didn’t use any software to find profitable niches based on keywords. Initially, I had purchased hundreds of templates from a well-known AdSense master (Joel Comm).

His templates were based on popular niches that were previously researched by him and his ‘team’. So initially that saved me the hassle of trying to find good niches myself. I started to constantly track my AdSense earnings, and realized that many of those niches were not paying me. In fact I was losing money on several of those niches.

On careful examination, I started to see some trends. I saw that some niches (and their sub-niches) were always profitable, and some were never profitable. I decided to eliminate the non-profitable sites, and create more sites focusing on the ones making me money. So I searched the net and downloaded some pre-made profitable keyword lists and consolidated all of them. I then categorized them based on my previous findings of which sites were profitable and which were not.

I should add here that whichever tool I use for my niche research, I can never be 100% sure whether the niches I have selected will be profitable or not. If I do my keyword research properly, I definitely have better chances of hitting good niches. BUT my earnings depend on Google – and their ‘Smart Pricing’ strategy often pays very low, even for the “highly profitable” niches. I can never know for sure until I make my sites and constantly monitor them.

Since I initially purchased the IAT package from Joel Comm, I had a large group of ‘popular ideas’ for sites with templates and articles. There were around 300 different ones. With HyperVRE, I built all these sites and waited to see if they were giving me profits or not (more on this later). As I mentioned above, I had to remove some of the niches because they were not profitable, and I was losing money on them. I ended up removing about 100 sites that were wasting my money, so I was left with about 200 good ones.

So you see, at the beginning I never got a chance to actually “select” my niches from scratch, as the initial niches were already provided to me. That is, I never actually went out and researched the niches myself – at the start. Again as mentioned earlier, when I analyzed the sites that were making me money, I started to see some trends in the kinds of sites that paid well, and the kinds of sites that did not pay so well. That’s when I started some keyword research. I then used some
keyword lists found on the net, and also the Top 40K Keyword list that’s in the gold member’s area at the HyperVRE site.
There were a few things that I would look for when trying to predict if a niche was going to be profitable or not. Notice I said “predict”. Like I said before, you don’t know for sure until you try it out. If it doesn’t end up being profitable, then scratch it and move on to the next niche.
I look for some important metrics in doing my Keyword research. I look at the average CPC, number of ads for that keyword, and number of searches in a month. Unfortunately, since I did not originally use a keyword research tool, I did not always have all these metrics at my disposal.

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