As you probably know by now, around here we operate under a few simple beliefs:
- Search traffic is by far the easiest traffic to turn into dollars.
- Search traffic is somewhat easy to get if you choose the right keywords and target properly.
When you’re going through the process of learning to get search traffic, it can be somewhat difficult to think of different ideas for keywords. Back when I started, I had a really hard time coming up with new ideas. What ended up happening to me is that I started a lot of sites that were similar to each other. Since all of my keywords were similar in nature, they all performed about the same. That would have been awesome if they were performing well, but they weren’t. My sites were all built around electronic related keywords – the CTR for Adsense was around 2-3% and that was because tech-knowledgeable people don’t click on ads. Clicks also weren’t worth that much so it took a ton of traffic to make any money.
Now that I’ve been around the block a few times, I can tell you that there are quite a few niches where you can get 10% of the visitors to click on an Adsense ad. One of mine gets $1.50 clicks and that means I can make $1.50 for every 10 search hits I get. 100 search hits is $15. There’s no way I would tell anyone what that niche is, but I can tell you that if you start testing more you will be a lot more likely to find solid niches. In the process, you’ll hit some losers (that will still make you some money).
If you aren’t willing to lose a few battles, you don’t deserve to win the war. I’m going to give you a lot of places you can look for keywords today, but it’s up to you to do the testing and those of you that are willing will do well. Those of you who are too scared to act will just keep reading for a few more years.
Before we get started I should probably make something very clear – I have had tons of sites that didn’t work out very well. I have always been willing to fall on my face. The honest truth guys is that you have to be willing to fail a few dozen times. You’ll find some winners, gain some experience, and you’ll also find some losers. The losers still have value because they can make some money and they can still be used to build some links. In that light, there is no such thing as a ‘loser’.
That said, here are some great places you can look for new keyword ideas:
1. The Sitepoint Marketplace – At Sitepoint, people are constantly buying and selling sites to each other. This is a great place to look for ideas because you can see what niches people are making money in. They don’t list what keywords they are ranking for usually, but they do tell you how much they make with their sites. Finding out what keywords they’re using is pretty easy if you take a look at their sites. Obviously, the keywords they are using will be in the page titles of their pages.
2. Amazon.com – Since Amazon sells just about anything under the sun, it’s a great place to go to get new ideas for keywords. Choose a category and browse through the products. Choose a different category and browse through more products. Each product name can be typed into a keyword tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. The tool will help you to expand on what you have. The idea here is to see as many different potential keywords as possible. You will save ideas and do further research on the keywords later. I don’t judge keywords while I’m brainstorming – I simply save ideas.
3. eBay – This one is just like Amazon. You’re simply going to take a look at products that are out there.
4. Billboards – When I’m driving down the interstate, I’m always looking at the billboards. Think about it; people are paying to advertise there. They’re paying for a reason. What I’ve found is that things you find on billboards often pay very well online. Why? Billboards usually advertise products and services with high profit margins. Sure you will have to do more research later but the idea here is to get ideas for keywords.
5. TV commercials – Again, when people pay to advertise commercially, there has to be some profit there. If you can get the traffic for free, it makes sense that you’ll be able to turn a profit.
I will sometimes sit in front of the TV with my laptop so that I can check search volumes for different things that are being advertised.
Overall guys, if you will alter your state of mind so that you’re constantly searching for new ideas for keywords and niches, they will honestly jump out of nowhere. I see new things almost everyday – if I only had time to go after them all. 
I would add that the Sitepoint sites for sale are quite often horribly designed. Imagine if you took their keywords and pushed past them in their own niche using the now infamous keyword sniping techniques that were once taught online.
You shouldn’t do that of course, Google doesn’t approve. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
For even more keyword ideas I like Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions tool. Add your favorite topic and watch where the questions that come up take you.
Great “out of the box” thinking here guys. Especially the “advertised on tv” tip. Do you have any idea what production costs are for a 30 second ad – let alone a scripted infomercial? Trust me, there’s TONS of money to be made if someone has made that big of an investment in production.
I usually just use MicroNicheFinder. Although I would say it is perfectly accurate, It is a great way to find new keywords and to check how competitive those keywords are.
Excellent article!!
Absolutely perfect! I tell you, you pulled the words out of so many peoples minds on this one, spot on. I often sit with my laptop infront of the television and use my mobile to look at bill board as well, it’s most definitely a state of mind.
Two things:
1. “you’ll hit some losers (that will still make you some money).” – You just have to love how even a losing site still turns a profit, love it!
2. You have to fall a few times.. couldn’t agree more.
Lovely article!
I have a question..
When using something like the Google Keyword Tool, an important column is the, “Approx search volume” column. Naturally this shows the number of searches for a specific keyword. Now, I know that that doesn’t tell you much about the competition and so on, but my question is this..
What sort of volume would you say in good? Ok, depends on competition, CTR and so on, but naturally it’s a start to know that there’s decent volume. Would 50,000 be good? Would 200,000 be good? What values are really big and wonderful and which ones are getting a bit low..
I look forward to hearing!
Hey Chris!
First of all, you have to make sure that you set the match type to exact. Otherwise, you won’t get anything useful at all.
This is a great question that’s also pretty difficult to answer. I have a niche site that only gets about 10 visitors per day but makes a couple bucks from those visitors. The search volume is obviously quite low (probably about 600 per month).
If you’re going to set up a small niche site, you’re willing to live with a number that’s quite small. What you have to do is take a look at how much the traffic is worth. If clicks are worth $1 you can live with a smaller search number than you could if clicks were worth $0.10.
200,000 on exact would be a pretty large keyword, one that would be likely to be very competitive.
Ah yes, exact match of course.
It gets really tricky to find decent niches. High traffic keywords naturally have lots of competitors and low traffic keywords often have very “cheap” adwords, so either you have to do some rocket science SEO on the high traffic keywords or you need to settle for a few cents from the lower traffic keywords.
Finding high traffic keywords, which have high payouts and minimal competition is near impossible, but then again, we’re not measuring against anything, do we say that $5/day is good or is that tiny? I guess that depends on how many niche sites we are running and what sort of maintenance they require.
I find it incredibly hard to source weird and wonderful niches. I’m not sure where people get inspiration from. I’ve spent some time thinking about it. The idea of TV commercials is decent, Radio adverts can be amazing because mispelt domains can be used, but other than those it’s an incredibly difficult venture, one which I will continue to search for until someone can tell me
Ideally, having a site which gets 10 hits a day, which a CPC of $1+ and a high CTR of 30%+ would be great as a start..
$5 per day on a keyword is actually great Chris. There are plenty of keywords that will pay more, but as you say there are different things we have to measure here. For the most part, rankings are pretty easy to maintain once you get them so I’m pretty happy when I find a $5 per day keyword that isn’t too difficult to target.
Thanks for the awesome list of places to look, I can’t soak up enough info about SEO. You guys are awesome!!
Another surprising place that you can find some good keywords is Craigslist. A lot of people don’t know of this source of keywords
I often browse through the google keyword tool itself to find different niches.
When you type in your keyword you’re searching and you scroll down past all the long tails that earn pennies and have no traffic eventually it scrolls down to 10-15 synonym keywords with a lot of traffic.
I have found a few ideas by investigating those high traffic terms in the bottom half of the keyword tool and those terms will lead you to other terms, which can be in totally different areas you hadn’t planned on researching.
I just want to say if you guys like this stuff, you’ll definitely want to check out Mark and Court’s new coaching videos! This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Buddy
Great tips here. One addition I would make as an add on yo your first idea, searching the SitePoint Marketplace?
When you see a site that interests you run it in the URL function of the Google Keyword Tool. Regardless of what keywords are in the title or the other SEO you can spot for yourself, this tells you what Google AdWords _thinks_ are the keywords being targeted. This is good “preventative maintenance” for any site your working on … if Google doesn’t _think_ your keywords are what _you_ thenk they are, you can stop running down a dead end street and fine tune your work. I’ve been very happy with some sites I work with Google’s perception, on other a big “holy Cow, how did it show up for _those_ keywords”. Easier to fix if you know the issues.
Thanks again for some great value here.
Court, you’re right, $5/day for a keyword is good indeed, I’d love to have several of those under my wing
I’ve been thinking about niche’s quite a lot lately, unfortunately there are very few decent places online to source material so it’s mostly thinking it up based on inspiring writing, such as yours.
I totally get the whole taking offline (radio, tv) and then making it online, that’s great, but what I think people really want to know is how to go about thinking of niches – I read a post about a gentleman who registered a random ’sump plug’ domain and ended up making some extra bucks every month from it, because it was searched for a couple hundred times a month and there were no competitors in the SERPs and, of course, there were some advertisers. But how on earth did he think of this? Was it completely random, did he spot a gap somewhere? These are the sorts of questions I’m asked on a daily basis by my followers and to be honest, I can’t really come up with an answer and was wondering if it’s something you could?
Anyway, questions inspire posts, so I hope that’s what I’ve done
Thanks for the tips Court, I just took your advice and discovered that ‘pink digital cameras’ were good keywords for my digital camera blog so I wrote a post!
I know this is an older post, but put this up here in case someone new comes along. Another place you can check for niches is in the backlink directories. Court has in his 102 backlink post on his IM site a link to url.nu . When you drill in for your topic, you can see what people are trying to build backlinks for. It can give you a couple ideas you may not have had before.
If no one has mentioned ezine articles, that is another place to see what topics people are writing about.
I don’t usually post comments but I can’t help it this time. I am actually learning fro this site. I have adsense on my website but not earning so much from it. I actually use my keyword phrase on the title of my website, “Making MOney On The Internet For Free”.
I search for that keyword phrase using the free Google keyword tool and found out that the CPC (cost-per-click) is more than $100. I do not have so much traffic. The website is more than a year old.
Is this because the website is free?
Thank you in advance for your
needed comments.
Hi court, i found your site lot of useful articles. Its two years since i started this niche business. I have two websites which are making me about 800-900$ per month. But recently, on my one blog google has disabled ad- serving and now i am back to 4-5$ a day. Two years of hard work and now its all finished. Its a big failure but this failure has learned me so many things about niche business. I get to know what works and what doesn’t.
Now i am going to start again. I am not a guy who stop himself from failure. I have got so much experiece from my failure and i’ve come to wisdom through failure.
I have given myself 6 month deadline and in this six months i have to make about 15 niche website and i will rank all of them #1 in google and your this website really help me a lot.
Really nice guide. I’m new to SEO and page rank so I’m in the early stages of trying to improve the traffic to my lens. It’s guides like this that have really been helping me as I’m starting to grasp the general ideas.
Thanks mate,
Matty
Hello!
Hello!
Thank you for putting up such another excellent article