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I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately, delving back into Adsense niche sites. I found two sites that have gotten me a re-energized:

1. Adsense Flippers
2. Niche Pursuits

Both sites have good information and are very straightforward in telling you what you need to do in order to build Adsense niche sites. These principles of niche Adsense site building can be expanded to other sites as well, since the success of any site, Adsense or otherwise, depends on your ability to rank for your chosen keywords and drive traffic.

And that’s the issue I think I’ve had. When I look back over my list of sites, I can see that many of the keywords I went after just weren’t that good. I never really sat down and took stock of why some of my sites worked and some didn’t. So I did. Comparing those that earned with those that didn’t, I noticed a few things that might be helpful:

• For me, brand names didn’t work. I found I was unable to beat out company sites, or even the large retailers for a brand name item. This seem even more true since Google started showing multiple results for the same site. Sometimes, the top 5 results are pages from the same (usually the manufacturing company’s site).
• I didn’t do enough research into Cost Per Click. I have a site that gets 80 – 100 visitors a day, which generates 3-5 clicks, but each click is only worth 30 cents (or less). I recommend looking for key terms that get at least $1 a click.
• I’m a tech guy, so many of the sites I built were targeted toward tech, but the problem with tech keywords is that the people searching for them are technical, which usually means they’re Internet savvy, which usually means they’re ad blind. The result? Good traffic, no Adsense (or other ad) clicks.
• Answering questions. By this I mean some of hte key terms I went after where intenedted to provide infoamtion in response to a query. But if you answer the question (how do I _____) with your content, there’s no need for the visitor to click on an Adsense link (or other ad) — you’ve already given them what they are looking for.

So with the above in mind, here’s some of my new guidelines:

• Target non-technical users
• Target generic terms, not brand-specific
• Only go after keywords with a value of $1 per click or higher
• And the hard one: target “entry” terms that are early in the click-stream (so you get out clicks on your ads)

With the above in mind, I fired up Micro Niche Finder (aff). I’d bought it years ago when it was version 2 (I think). My current version was 4, but they’re on 5, so I did the update (thanks lifetuime updates!). I know a lot of peopl euse Market Samurai, but since I’d already paid for MNF….

No lie – finding good terms is hard (for me anyway). I’ve come up with about 6 potential candidates afetr several hours of playing with MNF. However (and this is a big however), I’ve moved toward finding low volume, low competition keywords. Maybe my keyword research methodology sucks, but I just can’t seem to find good volume (call it 5K searches per month), low competition keyword worth at least $1 a click with a top level domain still available.

Sp here’s where I’m headed: Niche Cluster sites. By Niche Cluster I mean a site that targets a cluster of low competition keywords. I’ve started looking for terms that have less than 1,000 local searches per month, some as low as only a few hundred. My intent it to try to build sites that “cluster” these terms so that the whole site has an aggregate search volume of several thousand when all the terms are added together.

Yet according to Google guidelines from their Panda update, multiple articles around the same topic targeting very similar keywords can flag your site for de-indexing. So the challenge will be to find clusters of related terms that have little to no overlap.

On the less theoretical side, I comissioned some linkbuilding from Lexorsoft for some existing properties, reformated the Adsense ads on three of my sites in a quest for a higher click-through rate, and added two more coupon offers to three of my point-of-sale affiliate sites.

Still waiting on the template for my rewards site!

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