People Who Can Benefit From Understanding How Online Markets Work

• Professionals (doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, chiropractors, massage therapists, dentists, orthodontists, funeral specialists, etc) who already have sites or are thinking about setting sites up
• Casual internet marketers
• Professional marketers
• Bloggers
• E-commerce site operators
• People who are just getting started with internet marketing

How To Calculate The Profit Potential Of A Market

By looking at individual keyword phrases (the words and phrases people search for in Google) we can get a lot of insight into how money is flowing through a market. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is extremely useful for this. Let’s take a look at an example keyword phrase so that we can further illustrate.

Example #1 – Provo Dentist (as a dentist)

For our first example, let’s take a look at the phrase ‘provo dentist’. If we look at the term in the the Adwords tool, we can see that the monthly search volume is 720. This means that 720 people are searching for this term each month in Google (approximately):

If we set the tool to show ‘Estimated Avg. CPC’ (which I did) we can determine that there is a dentist somewhere (or a marketing company) in Provo who is willing to pay $3.80 per click to buy traffic from Google. If we multiply the amount of searches by the CPC (the amount these people are willing to pay to buy a click from Google), we can determine that the top advertiser is willing to spend $2736 per month to buy traffic. They probably don’t spend this much because some people will click on the listings of other advertisers, but the point is that at least this much money is changing hands. This means that we can safely assume that the market size of the online ‘provo dentist’ market is at least $2736 per month, and that’s if the dentists are breaking even. If they are making a profit (likely), the actual market size will be higher than this.

It’s extremely difficult to get 100% of the traffic for any keyword phrase in fact you would need multiple web properties to come close. If your site ranks #1 in Google, you can plan on getting around 40% of the available traffic. That means that in order to get an accurate representation of your true profit potential in a given market, you are going to need to discount, using only 40% of the original number. This would mean that we would end up with a potential of $1094 per month, assuming that we could get our site to #1 in Google. This would of course be free traffic and we could increase our share of the market by also buying some of that traffic but that’s a different story altogether.

Another factor that’s still in play is that there are other keyword phrases that are used to search for dentists in Provo. The above screen-shot shows us that. There are also people who don’t live in Provo who would probably drive to Provo to go to a dentist that they liked. Springville is five minutes away from Provo, Orem is five minutes away from Provo, Mapleton is 10 minutes away from Provo, etc.

To get a true representation of the size of a market, you would need to add up the potential for all keyword phrases that could be used to search for your service. In this case, we would need to calculate and add up the potential for the following keyword phrases: provo dentist, provo dentists, dentist in provo, dentists in provo, springville dentist, springville dentists, dentist in springville, dentists in springville, orem dentist, orem dentists, dentists in orem, dentist in orem, etc. There are probably a lot of other cities that are nearby that would work well – you would have to do the research yourself to find them.

Example #2 – Provo Dentist (as a marketer)

For our first example, we assumed that we were an actual dentist who could take on clients from the traffic. If we look at the same keywords (and the same numbers) from the viewpoint of a marketer, things will come out differently:

We are still seeing the same numbers, but now we know that we aren’t going to make all of the profits – the dentists will also need to make some of the profit or the money will obviously quit flowing.

$2736 will still be available – that calculation doesn’t change. What does change is the percentage of the profit that we can make. We will still only be able to get 40% of the traffic if we end up at #1 in Google so we’re knocked down to $1094, just like before. From there we need to discount further. There are a few ways that we can do things.

If we wanted to establish an actual relationship with a dentist in Provo, we could probably do a 50/50 split of the profits which would mean that we could make about $547 per month if we got ranked #1 for ‘provo dentist’.

In order to make this work, we would of course have to talk to dentists and find one who was willing to partner with us in this way. For those of you who aren’t comfortable with that, you would have to choose another alternative like Google Adsense.

There are certainly dentists in Provo who advertise via Google Adsense, so how can we determine our profit if we decide to put these ads on our pages? We simply discount further based on how we expect our traffic to act. Here’s how the numbers will work out (approximately of course):

• There is still $2736 on the table
• However, we can still only get 40% of the traffic (knocks us down to $1094)
• We won’t get the full CPC because Google will take a cut and we won’t always get clicks on the highest paying ad. We can only expect to get 25% of the CPC number we see in the Adwords tool. This knocks us down to $273.50.
• Also we can’t get every visitor to click on an ad. In fact, we can only plan on getting 5% (in some cases you can get more clicks but we want to be conservative in our estimate) of our visitors to click an ad. This takes us all the way down to $13.68 per month.

We would still need to compensate for the fact that there are a lot of different keyword phrases that we could use as a marketer. The Springville and Orem keyword sets would still be on the table and as a marketer, geographical location really doesn’t matter. We could target keywords for any location because Google Adsense will have advertisers in most cities. We would need to make up for our small piece of the earnings pie by putting a lot of keywords together and getting traffic with all of them.

Uses Of This Skill Set

We of course can use these skills in a number of ways. A dentist could use these numbers to determine the relative value of a marketing company that’s offering their services. Any other service professional could of course do the same. On top of that, if a service professional was willing to pick up a new set of skills they could take care of their own marketing and pocket all of the money that would be available (in this case that’s $1094 per month – not a fortune but this would of course compound as the client came for additional work and referred friends). After a few years it’s likely that income would build nicely. Remember that our numbers are also very conservative here. We are assuming that the advertisers who are willing to buy the traffic are only breaking even. If they make a profit, there’s more profit to be made.

Marketers can of course use this type of market analysis to determine the profit potential of any keyword phrase or market that they want to enter. This saves them the time and hassle of creating web properties that don’t have little potential. Keep in mind that this methodology can be used for any keyword phrase or for any combination of keyword phrases. Marketers could also use this skill to sell ad space to the dentist (or of course any other service provider). By showing them the profit potential of the keywords, it could be easier to sell an ad. By cutting out Google you could get a larger share of profits. A dentist who can see that they have the potential to make over $1000 per month from a ranking would definitely be willing to spend $200 per month to buy ad space.

Questions About The Method?

If you have any questions about this method of market analysis, please let me know in the comments. I want to help each of you to understand this process as much as I possibly can.

One of the coolest things about creating web properties like hubs is the residual benefit. Naturally I see my earnings from HubPages each month and know exactly what’s going on with them. They are fairly stable and while there are natural peaks and valleys, my hubs have continued to produce very nicely. Since the date of my first hub’s completion (April 7, 2009) until today (February 11, 2010), my hubs have produced $4,003.43:

I know that these numbers aren’t enormous and in all honesty, I could have done a lot better with hubs if I had continued to work on them. I could have updated the hubs, let websites and other ‘hubbers’ know about them, and I certainly could have written some articles to help strengthen the hubs with links. I haven’t done that so it’s pretty dang cool how well the hubs have done. I noticed in my Adsense account that my hubs produced over $400 in January of this year and it’s been more than seven months since I set them up:

There are definitely a lot of ways out there that can be used to make money online. HubPages for me has been a pretty solid one. I have a total of 105 hubs which means that each one of them on average has produced $38.13. If I compare that to the amount of work that it took to set them up, it’s a pretty dang nice hourly wage. It will get more and more exciting to watch the earnings as more and more months pass by.

The Future of my 105 Hubs

I have a lot of stuff going on right now but I think it would be pretty cool to make an extra $20,000 or so from HubPages this year. There’s no question that it’s possible. I’m already on pace to make more than $6,000 in a 12 month period and in all honesty, I’ve put very little effort into it. I did all of my work on my HubPages within a 45 day period and almost all of that work was within a 30 period, working on the project for a couple hours per day.

I plan to create some more hubs and I also plan on doing some work to improve the ones I already have. I can update them with fresh content and I can work on getting a few links for them. Generally when I do this kind of thing I see things shake up quite a bit. The earnings will either start moving up immediately or they will fall for a month or so and will move up after that. Either way they will end up in a much better place than they are right now.

How to Succeed with HubPages

I’ve given a lot of advice on hubs in the past but wanted to give a little again. As is usually the case with this type of web property, picking keywords is crucial. You want to pick keywords that have decent volumes and CPCs with limited competition. The Massive Traffic 101 webinar can help you to learn what I’m talking about if it isn’t making sense to you right now.

Hubs are like any other web property, they require content and links to get traffic. If you create a premium reference article on a topic, it’s possible that it will attract a lot of links. There are obviously other methods that can be used to build links to your hubs, including article submission and trading. The amount you earn on hubs will be fairly proportionate to the amount of hubs you produce and the amount (and strength) of links pointing at your hubs. You will of course want to include the keywords you pick in the title of your hubs and in the text of the hubs.

How To Increase Your HubPages Earnings

1. Create more hubs. Simple math tells us that if I set up 100 more hubs that were designed around keywords that were as good as the first 200 that I set up, I could double my earnings. A lot of people never reach their potential because they aren’t willing to put in enough effort. Making money with the internet requires quite a bit of work, especially in the beginning. Learning how to use math to see how big you can take any online business can be extremely useful.

2. Work harder to promote your hubs. Linking to your hubs from blogs, or getting other web sites to link to them will help you to increase your earnings significantly. Most people who have HubPages never do anything to promote them and that leaves them a lot weaker than they could be. Those who do really well with hubs generally do the ‘behind the scenes’ work to improve the strength of their hubs.

Spread Your Effort Around

HubPages certainly isn’t the only method out there for making money. I have been working on a lot of different projects in the last year and my hubs have taken a back seat for the most part. I’m going to start putting some effort there but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be working 24/7 on them. There’s something really nice about working on your own site. It can be sold at some point and you of course get to keep 100% of the earnings. However, there are benefits to working on hubs as well. You start with more authority than you would on a new site so you can often earn more quickly (this doesn’t mean that you will earn more overall) with hubs. They are certainly worth putting some time into.

1. Lack of understanding – Most people don’t understand the basic concepts required to build traffic on a large scale. Even if they are willing to put in the work, they are working on the wrong things. I’ve been there and I know exactly what it’s like. It is excruciatingly frustrating. Step 1 is to learn the concepts required and step 2 is to execute.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the most crucial concepts that I have used to make money and honestly, most people don’t understand them well. Let me give you a few examples.

Most people know that they are supposed to do keyword research for their sites but they really have no idea what that means. They don’t know what they’re looking for and they certainly don’t know how to integrate keywords into their sites properly. They don’t know how to create a structure that will help them to rank for keywords.

This causes major problems in their businesses. They start off by picking overly competitive keywords that would have no value even IF they ranked for them. Then they move on to improperly targeting the bad keywords with their sites. They then finish it all off by NOT creating any kind of authority for their site. If this is your method, you will have to throw an unbelievable amount of mud at the wall to have a few speckles stick.

Another concept that most people don’t understand is how to build the right links, to the right places. Bloggers and other site owners know that they are supposed to build links BUT they don’t know how to do this properly. They don’t know the underlying factors that could help them to dominate their niches and keywords.

This causes people to spend massive amounts of time trying to get links that will make little difference. They don’t point them to the right places so they have little effect. On top of that, most people don’t know where to get links in the first place.

2. Overload/misinformation – When I first started blogging, I had a distinct advantage. I already knew how to build traffic and let’s be frank. Making money with the internet is 100% about building traffic and making money with that traffic.

You would think that since I already understood both of those principles, it would be easy for me to make money with a blog right? Ironically, that wasn’t the case. It didn’t happen that way for me because I got sucked into the same trap as everyone else. I started reading all of the Make Money Online/Internet Marketing blogs. This caused a change in my belief system that was hard to recover from.

The problem is that many of these guys are SO good at presenting their ideas, they get you to believe concepts that simply aren’t true (sometimes they’re true but aren’t as effective as other ideas). You start reading this stuff and pretty soon your idea of what works and what doesn’t is completely warped and this causes you to put time into a bunch of activities that will make very little difference to your success.

I can’t believe how long it took for me to snap out of it. I spent over a year of my life putting in 16 hour days, mostly on tasks that didn’t work. After all of that time, I still couldn’t crack $1000 per month as a blogger, even though I had previously created other sites that made a lot more than that, with a lot less effort.

I forgot a lot of what I knew to be true. Other people convinced me that their ideas were better than the concepts I already understood and I did the weak sauce thing – I believed in them more than I believed in myself.

I was completely overloaded. My new list of tasks that had to be done was so long, it would take literally every waking hour to complete all of them.

The other part of the scenario that I got myself into was that I became addicted to the information. Every day I read more and more and every once in a while these guys would publish something absolutely ’spectacular’, something that seemed like it would send my online business to the moon. I would get all excited and would start executing this new technique, adding to my completely out-of-whack workload.

This was a completely vicious cycle and to be honest I started thinking that I didn’t know how to make this stuff work anymore.

As you can probably tell, that wasn’t the greatest part of my life and you don’t yet know the worst of it. I was so sold on the kool-aid these guys were selling, I let my already successful websites completely self-destruct. I completely stopped working on them for almost 18 months. My income was in a negative slide even though I was putting more time in than ever.

I believe that most of the people who are trying to learn how to use the internet to make money are in that same cycle. What concerns me the most is that most of them never learned the fundamentals so it will be extremely difficult for them to pull out of it.

I’m grateful that I was somehow able to escape that vicious trap. At some point in that terrible slide I hit a bottom and started looking at the facts. I started analyzing the results of all of the nonsense I had been working on. I threw out the garbage and I went back to the basics. I worked on my fundamentals again and I went back to the logic that made me successful in the first place. I completely recovered and grew my sites to many times beyond what they had ever been.

Many of you already have websites and for you, all you need is traffic. Building traffic is easy if you understand the fundamentals. It shouldn’t seem complicated and if it does, chances are that you are in a cycle of overload. Today is the day to snap out of that cycle and I’m going to help you to do it.

3. Time Management – Most people spend almost all of their time learning/researching/thinking instead of working on tasks that will produce benefit.

Don’t misunderstand – you REALLY need to learn and understand the correct principles before you’ll be able to make money, but learning them is never going to be enough. Finding the balance between research and real work is something that can’t be ignored.

This principle stands out in many areas of life. For example, let’s say that two people are overweight and want to get fit. Neither knows a lot about fitness.

Person A decides to learn everything possible about fitness and buys every book and course that he/she can find. This person then spends two hours every single day for a year studying fitness. In a year it’s likely that this person will know a LOT about fitness, right?

Person B decides that the best course of action is to spend two hours per day running (or walking) on the treadmill. This person knows little about fitness but knows that lack of exercise caused them to be overweight in the first place.

Let’s fast forward to the end of that year. Which person is going to be better off? Which person will get the most results in year one? Person B will be the clear winner in this time period.

To be fair, it could be argued that even though Person B will have a lot more success in the first year, Person A will have a tactical advantage in the second year – at least this is what we tell ourselves. We want to believe that our failures are caused by lack of knowledge. It’s a lot easier to accept them that way. It doesn’t make us feel weak if we simply don’t have the knowledge to succeed. On the other hand, recognizing that we don’t work hard enough to succeed is a lot harder to swallow.

What would actually happen in this example is that Person B would come out of the first year feeling great and Person A would come out of the first year feeling like a failure. This would happen for Person A because they will have made no real progress. Person B will have accomplished something tangible so Person B will feel good about the year. I’d be willing to bet the farm that this will cause Person B to be more likely to continue while Person A will struggle to begin down the path of effort required to change.

Two addictions would develop in the year. Person A would have failed at making a real change but would have learned some really cool things. It feels good to learn really cool things and it can become an unhealthy addiction. Person B would also likely develop an addiction, an addiction to positive growth. It feels good to grow, to change in a positive way. Person B will continue on the path that helped them to change their body.

Making money online isn’t that different from this example. Most of us allow ourselves to be Person A. We allow ourselves to spend an unlimited amount of time on activities that we believe will perfect our knowledge but spend very little ‘on the treadmill’.

Most people that do really well with building traffic become addicted positively to growth. The day before yesterday one of my sites had its best day ever, it was a HUGE day. It felt completely awesome. What did I do? I spent a bunch of time working on that site. I’m addicted to growth and this is a healthy addiction. It pushes me toward real growth.

All of that said, let’s not be naive. Making money online isn’t as simple as running two hours per day on a treadmill. There are real principles that have to be understood and executed and they aren’t principles that everyone understands.

If you feel like you don’t understand the basics, I want to help you. The basics aren’t hard and they aren’t complicated. Today is the day to learn them.

How To Solve These Problems And Build Massive Traffic

Tonight Mark and I are going to be doing a two-hour webinar called Massive Traffic 101 for our members and for the first time, we’re going to invite everyone to attend. The webinar will be free of charge, even for those who aren’t members of The Keyword Academy.

Update: We held the webinar on January 28, 2010 and it is now available for download, at the bottom of this page.

Here are some of the fundamentals that we will discuss in detail:

• Choosing keyword phrases that will produce maximum results with minimal effort. One of the biggest keys to my success is choosing easy to rank for keywords that pay. There are millions and millions of such keywords out there and if you can find them, you’ll be well on your way.
• Properly targeting keywords for optimum search engine relevancy. This process is simple and easy, once you understand the concepts.
• Link building techniques that improve search engine rankings. Many people know that they need to build links, but they don’t understand where to get them from and they don’t understand how to structure their links. I can promise that if you’re in this boat, after tonight the mystery will be solved.
• Time management. Putting time into the wrong things will cripple everything you’re working for. Learning where to put your time is critical.

Update: Download Massive Traffic 101 here:

Massive Traffic 101 – Audio Only
Massive Traffic 101 – Full Video

• injury/injuries (recovery, treatments, etc.)
• NFL jerseys, NFL posters
• online education, online schools, online degrees
• outdoor microphones
• football helmets, football helmets for kids, radio football helmets
• energy drinks
• improve credit score, check credit score, how to check credit score
• motorcycle insurance, bike insurance
• roadside assistance
• cheap car insurance
• down comforters
• golf lessons, online golf school
• beach vacations
• striped ties
• wireless microphones
• wireless headsets, radio headsets
• commercial ovens
• best deodorants, deodorants, men’s deodorants
• hunger control, appetite control, appetite suppressants
• best chocolate, best tasting chocolate
• cactus plants
• running tips
• online meetings, online presentations, online business tips
• online dating, online relationships, relationship compatability
• longest lasting batteries, lithium batteries, high tech batteries
• best car rental
• pink digital cameras
• disneyworld vacations, disneyworld tickets

Three commercial breaks and plenty of keyword ideas. Now it’s on me to go through these, expand upon these ideas, and analyze the CPCs, search volume, and competition.

What is best to create a site around, a product or service? To better clarify,
would it be better to research a product such as sunglasses (and for a minute,
lets say they are a big deal) or a service like vinyl siding installers?

That’s a great question and one that I’ve given a lot of thought to.

We want to choose the right type of keywords because we want to do well. There’s no point in choosing a keyword (or set of keywords) that won’t be profitable.

So how do we determine the profitability of a keyword before we decide to use it?

I personally use one primary method to determine this – I look at what advertisers are willing to pay to buy searchers from Google.

This isn’t a method that most people use, but it’s REALLY useful. The commercial intent of searchers is baked into the CPC and if you start buying traffic from Google, you’ll agree with me.

Imagine that you’re an advertiser who is willing to buy 1,000 visitors per month from Google at $3 each. Total bill: $3,000 per month. Why would you be willing to spend that kind of money? Because you think that you can make more than $3,000 from that traffic.

To decide whether a keyword is valuable, all you have to do is look at the searches and the CPCs, with the Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s pretty hard to argue against the numbers.

If one keyword has a$1 CPC and 1,000 searches per month, it’s going to be a lot better than a keyword that has $0.50 CPC and 1,000 searches per month. The higher CPC of the first keyword shows that there is more commercial intent. In other words, advertisers are able to make more profit from that keyword.

Getting organic traffic doesn’t change the commercial intent of the people who search for the keywords and this is a great indicator for whether a keyword or set of keywords will be profitable.

To answer the question from the beginning of this article, all you would have to do is look at them both with the Adwords tool. You should easily be able to identify which one has more potential to make profits.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

• They had the potential to make a lot of money.
• They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

14. Your ad placement is poor. I still see a lot of people that are only using vertical banners in their sidebars. These honestly don’t get clicked nearly as often as larger, rectangle units. Inserting large and medium rectangles in your posts will almost always lead to getting more clicks. Vertical banners are a nice addition but are best used as a supplement – not as the primary unit.

13. You have Adsense on too many pages. Yes, I said you have Adsense on too many pages. Adsense should be on pages that do a good job of targeting keywords. When you put it up on pages and posts that don’t target keywords well, you will have poorly targeted traffic that either won’t click an ad or won’t convert well for the advertiser. When your clicks don’t convert well for advertisers you get SMART PRICED.

12. Your pages aren’t Adsense optimized. If the ads that show up on a page don’t match the topical content of the page/post, you have a problem that needs to be fixed. The ads that show up should be very similar to the ones that you’re trying to get traffic with. If they aren’t, they won’t convert well for the advertiser and this leads to you getting SMART PRICED.

Adsense relevancy optimization and onsite SEO are alike in a lot of different ways. To trigger the right ads on a page you should include your keyword in the HTML title, page headings, throughout the text of the page, and probably as a tag or label if your site is a blog.

11. You aren’t testing which of your pages convert well. I have started using an Adsense channel on each page that gets search traffic – at least until I know that it converts well. I know that there are a limited amount of testing channels available, but you can run a channel on a page until you know that it’s doing well. You can then remove it so that you can test the next page. If a page is converting at a low CTR, you probably have a problem with your Adsense optimization or you have a keyword that doesn’t have advertiser bids.

When I implemented channels I was blown away by which pages were doing well. Pages that I counted out were doing well and pages I thought were amazing were terrible. That led to me looking deeper into why some pages couldn’t convert to clicks while others could.

10. You target keywords with extremely low CPCs. I generally try to target keywords that have Adwords CPCs over $1. This can be checked with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. The higher the CPC, the higher the potential to get higher paying clicks.

9. Your focus is far too wide. I talk to people all the time that tell me how they’re adding 5-10 new articles to their sites each day. This generally leads to a site eventually having thousands of pages, most of which can’t ever produce a search visitor let alone a valuable Adsense click. Most people would do a lot better by focusing on a few key keyword targeted pages and getting people to link to them. Ask yourself what types of articles you’re adding – what is their purpose? I understand that sometimes we create articles to influence, entertain, etc. You probably shouldn’t have Adsense on those articles/pages.

8. Your ads don’t blend well with your site. Unless you have a very strange niche, matching the background color of your ads to the background color of your site will almost always generate more clicks. The color of the titles of your ads (the click-able part) should match the link color of your site or should be blue. There are exceptions but I would challenge you to test this and then try to beat it. You usually can’t.

7. You don’t know how to get people to link to your pages/posts. If you can’t generate links, you can’t get ranked. Most people spend all day working on their sites while they should be spending all day trying to figure out how to get linked to. 90/10 is the rule and that leaves you with 10% of your time to spend on your site itself and the rest figuring out how to get linked to.

6. You don’t understand how to target a keyword with a post page. This is why you generate almost all of your Adsense clicks on your home page. This problem combined with not understanding how to get linked to causes a nasty inability to get traffic and clicks.

5. You struggle to choose profitable topics. You will therefore probably choose to do ‘make money online’ because everyone else is doing it. Understanding the metrics of choosing solid keywords is a crucial aspect of making money with Adsense.

4. You don’t know how to judge your competition. That means you’ll get yourself into trying to rank for keywords that are above your skill set and this causes you to get discouraged and stop working. After a few months you will get more determined and will then continue to pursue the keywords that are above your skill set. This vicious cycle repeats again and again.

3. You have information addiction. Instead of acting on what you know, you try to add to what you know. You know who you are – you argue SEO theory on every site imaginable even though you’ve never made enough money through SEO to buy a new computer. At some point you need to walk away from the sites you love and start making it happen.

2. You’re too lazy to test. There are a lot of metrics you can test while using Adsense. You can test your ad placement, background color, link color, text color, and ad size. If you’re too lazy to do performance optimization on any of your sites, you are probably seriously under-performing. I can’t stress this enough – every single site will be different. One theme will work great in one niche, and terribly on another. One unit will work great on one site, and bad on another.

1. You’re a blogger. Yes, this can be a huge problem when you’re trying to make money with Adsense. It’s very easy to get caught up in becoming famous and as a result, you may sacrifice your original goal – to make money. Blogging and Adsense don’t work together as well as many people believe and if you lose focus you may lose your ability to make money.

Blogging can work very well with Adsense if you do proper testing, have the right focus, and use it on the right pages. In my opinion most bloggers are probably getting smart priced. Some can still make money and some can’t. The ones that do make money could make a lot more if they got their account under control.

Money in a spread sheet is fun and all, but… what good does it do to pick a fancy smancy keyword if you can’t ever get into a position in Google and other search engines where you can get some traffic? I’ve found keywords before that have over 10,000,000 searches per month with super high CPCs. Unfortunately they’re useless because it would take a team of 150 of people to develop a top ranking for them.

Making sure that the competition isn’t too fierce is one of our biggest priorities when we choose a topic for a site. If I’m not 90% sure that I can rank for a keyword, I’m not going to waste my time.

For those of you that are starting out, you need to be especially careful to not choose keywords that are too difficult. I would start with simple niches, get some wins, and then move forward to slightly more difficult niches. Don’t try to play in the majors when you’ve never tried to play tee-ball.

Competitive Analysis

Here are the nuts and bolts of what I’m actually talking about. Step 1 is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Let’s analyze the keyword ‘cell phones’ just to see what we get. Here are the sites that come up on the first page:

What we need to do here is analyze how strong these pages are and make a decision about whether we can compete or not. A solid way to do this is by taking a look at Google’s own method for determining the relative strength of pages – PageRank.

PageRank is a scale (0-10) that can show us how good Google thinks each page online is. If a page is PageRank 10, Google is saying it’s one of the best and strongest pages online. On the other hand, if a page is PageRank 0, we know that Google thinks it’s a weak page.

You can find the PageRank of any page by installing the Google Toolbar for your internet browser and turning on the PageRank feature. The PageRank of each page you visit will then be displayed on the toolbar. You will see a little green bar at the top of your browser and if you hover over that bar it will tell you the PageRank of the page you’re looking at.

A way to short cut this process is to install the SEO For Firefox browser extension. This will help you to look up PageRank directly in Google’s results. If I do the same search with SEO For Firefox turned on, the results will look like this:

All of this extra jazz under each listing is being put there by SEO For Firefox. If we want to see the PR (PageRank) of each page, we click each of the little question marks by the PR under each listing. It will then look like this:

The little 7 next to the ‘PR:’ under the T-Mobile listing means that this particular page is a PR7 page. It would take a very serious campaign to compete with that page. The other pages in the top 4 are PR6, PR5, PR5, and PR4. That’s a boat-load of strength and I would recommend running for the hills. You don’t want to compete for keywords like this until after you have this whole process down.

PR5 pages are incredibly strong pages. PR4 pages are also pretty strong pages. We don’t even want to talk about PR6+.

If you’re starting out, you want to try to find keywords with competition that’s under PR3. I would prefer to see most of you find keywords that are even easier than that. If all you ever did was find keywords with <PR2 competition (they would of course have to have decent potential), you would be doing yourself a huge favor. You can beat PR3s and PR4s but it’s going to take a lot more work – sometimes too much work.

Guys I know that this is a floating scale and each of you has a different level of experience. Some of you have this down and will be able to take on PR4 pages. Others won’t be able to. All of you should start out choosing keywords that are fairly easy and move up the scale after you get some wins. I’m beating out quite a few PR7 pages now but that doesn’t mean it would have been a good idea 4 years ago. I would have lost my mind and would have probably quit.

If you really want to take this process to the next level you can read this lesson: How Many Links Does It Take To Get Ranked #1 In Google? I don’t feel like it’s necessary all of the time, but some of you will get some value out of it. The lesson today can teach you how to choose winners almost all of the time if you’ll just follow the concepts.

What you need to do now is go through the keywords in your spread sheet so you can analyze their competition. If I think I can rank for a keyword, I usually mark it green on my spread sheet. If I can’t rank for a keyword I mark it red. Do it and then you’ll know exactly which keywords to use.

Before you can choose a good topic for a website, you first need to be able to see different ways that money can be made. Once you’re able to understand a few simple concepts, you’ll truly start to see how many possibilities there are.

Here are the two main types of sites I like to own:

• Review Sites – Review sites are great because all you have to do is review different products and/or services. You can review anything and still make money. You could review cell phones, credit cards, insurance companies, digital cameras, baby products, home and/or garden products, office supplies, books, movies, bedding, clothes, food, or virtually anything else that someone would have an opinion on.
• Informational Article Sites – To understand what kind of site this is, you’re going to want to take a look at Wikipedia. They provide basic information about basically every topic. What you would do is provide basic, encyclopedic information about topics, except your article site would be more specialized. You would pick a single topic instead of trying to cover everything under the sun. You can create a site like this about almost anything: finance, loans, stocks, kids, parenting, cars, money, marketing, plumbing, DIY, homes, ants, dogs, or anything else.

These ideas might not seem super exciting now, but trust me they rule. The alternative is creating a site that sells products and that’s the last thing you want. That would mean you would have to fulfill orders, ship products, and a bunch of other junk that you don’t want to do (I think I just got sick to my stomach).

The type of site you want is one that can grab passive traffic from search engines, and then flip that traffic for a profit. With Google Adsense, you can do this with a site about any topic that has value to an advertiser. I can make money every night when I’m asleep – I can make money if I’m asleep for that matter. I made money while I was at lunch today and I made money while I was at the gym.

My First Website

The first site I ever had was a review site about cell phones. The site took forever to build because I had to learn HTML and build each page from scratch. No I know that it’s much easier than that, but at the time that’s what I had to do.

The site was very simple. I had a homepage, and then I had a page about each phone that I wanted to review. I would basically just tell about the different features of each phone and would then talk about other similar phones that had better or worse features. After a few weeks of writing about phones I got a knack for what features phones should have. Before I started the site I didn’t exactly know a ton about phones so I would research in order to write about them.

This site was an online piece of garbage. Honestly I didn’t know the first thing about web design and it looked terrible. Even though this site was ridiculously bad, it still made money.

People look online for reviews of almost every product and after a few months I was able to get my site to come up in Google for cell phone review related keywords. After a while I was able to get some traffic from people looking for the phones themselves.

Making money with the site was very simple. All I had to do was place a Google Adsense unit on each page. A certain percentage of the traffic clicked on the ad and I made money from that. After a while I tried Yahoo’s version of Adsense and it paid a little better (it doesn’t anymore) so I stuck with that. My best month on that site produced over $3500 in revenue. Most of you would never believe it if you saw that site but it’s the honest truth. I don’t have the site anymore or I’d invite you to take a look at how bad I am at web design.

The point here is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make money with the internet. YOU can create a simple site that reviews products and/or services and you’ll be able to grab some traffic that has value.

I would probably start by thinking about products that you like because those will be the easiest to review. I would then do a little research to find out if there’s money to be made.

Market Research for Topic Selection

To find out if you can make money with a given topic, you need to take a look at keywords related to your topic. To do this I would use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It not only allows you to find out what keywords are being searched for in Google, it also allows you to find out if advertisers are willing to pay to buy your traffic. For researching a market, this tool is as good as gold.

What you have to do is simply start typing in words and phrases that relate to your possible topic. For example, if I was going to start another site that reviewed cell phones, I would probably start by typing in some of the following terms:

• cell phones
• cell phones
• motorola phones
• motorola cell phones
• samsung phones
• samsung cell phones
• nokia phones
• iphone
• cell phone reviews
• motorola razr
• motorola krzr
• iphones
• and lots of other cell phone terms i could find

So basically what I’m doing here is taking a look at different phones and phrases that I think people might be searching for. I don’t really have to guess whether a keyword is searched for or not, because the tool will show me whether it is or isn’t:

As you can see, the keyword I typed in (samsung cell phones) appears at the top of the left column, and then the approximate average search volume appears in the right hand column. The search volume is monthly so the 40,500 is the amount of times ’samsung cell phones’ is searched for per month on Google. Google is by far the biggest search engine but you could still expect to get some traffic from Yahoo and MSN.

If you’re going to use this tool, you need to make sure to change the match type to exact. Otherwise, you won’t be getting the correct search data. I also clicked the ‘choose columns to display’ drop-down box and selected ’show estimated avg cpc’. This is what shows me what advertisers are willing to pay to buy traffic right now. The $1.90 found at the top of the left column teaches us that there are advertisers that will pay $1.90 to buy one click from Google. This is good because Google will allow you to ‘borrow’ their relationship with this advertiser. You can place Google’s ad on your site and when Google makes their $1.90 for a click, they will cut you a share. On average you can expect to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the CPC for your commission. Sometimes this will be more and sometimes it will be less, but we need to be able to get an idea of what we’re going to get paid and 25% is good enough to suit our purpose.

What’s interesting about this tool is that no matter what we type in, Google will come up with a list of keywords that are related to our original topic. In this case, we have a big list of keywords that are related to samsung cell phones. This helps us a lot because these keywords are extra keywords that we could probably get traffic from eventually. Some of the smaller terms on this list will be a lot easier to get ranked for than samsung cell phones will be, so after we decide on our topic we will usually make a list of all potential keywords that are related to our topic.

Exercise:

What you need to do now is type all kinds of different things into the Adwords tool. If you’re struggling for ideas, you should check out this article: 5 Places You Can Look For New Keywords. There are literally tens of thousands of profitable things you could choose.

When I’m using this tool, I usually opt for words and phrases that have CPCs higher than $1. This isn’t a hard rule and I don’t always stick to it but as a general rule it’s useful. I also tend to try to find keywords that have 3,000 searches or more per month but again, this isn’t something that I always stick to. Sometimes 10 hits per day is worth a lot if you get clicks that are worth $5. On the other hand, clicks that are worth $0.10 can really add up if you can get thousands of visitors per day.

If you can find keywords that have over 3,000 searches per day with CPCs over $1, you can probably make some money with them. Save them on a spreadsheet so that you can analyze their competition later. Update: Find out how to analyze your competition here: Choosing A Topic For A Website Part 2 – Analyzing Competition.

1. Search traffic is by far the easiest traffic to turn into dollars.
2. 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.