Starting an Adsense Niche Site and Building an Automated Income Stream

Making Money with Adsense? The concept behind a niche site.

You've heard of these magical little money making gems before, they're called adsense niche sites. The basic idea is to create a website that receives traffic automatically, primarily from search engines, and makes money on the CPC (cost per click) model that is Google Adsense. This is hugely appealing to anyone starting up online because once it's set up, it acts as a sort of 'set & forget' stream of income. So how do you make it happen? The first step is picking your keyword!

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Starting an Adsense Niche Site and Building an Automated Income Stream[/caption]

Choosing a Keyword

By doing a little research into an industry of your choice, you can find a good keyword that has the potential to make money. The trick is to pick the 'low hanging fruit', so to speak, that will get you highly ranked in google with least amount of effort. By using the google keyword tool you can filter out what the best keyword is. After logging in using your adwords account (you can sign up here),you can then search a particular keyword or set of keywords and you'll get a series of options.

Each option has information on competition, local and global monthly searches as well as average cost per click. The so called 'magic formula', is to find a a site with 1,000 - 10,000 monthly searches, with a reasonable cost per click ($1+) and high competition. The low amount of searches usually means you have less competition to deal with when people search for your keyword (low hanging fruit!), and a decent cost per click means you should make a decent amount each time your ad is clicked. If you're wondering why competition needs to be high it's because this tool is designed for people selling the advertising. The higher the competition, the more people are competing and paying a decent sum of money per click and therefore a higher chance of you making more money.

>>> Google's 200 Ranking Factors

Once you've found a good solid keyword, type it into google and see what comes up. If you find that there are deep links (eg, a link that goes beyond the domain name - http://www.google.com/deep/folder/link/ ...) then your chances of ranking are looking very good, you can set up the your website.

Setting up your website properly

You've got a keyword now you need a domain name, preferably a .com, .net or .org, that uses your keyword as the main name (eg. www.mykeyword.com). If the keyword is unavailable, try adding a few letters and create a name slightly longer but close to the keyword (like www.mykeywordhq.com or www.mykeywordcentral.com). Buying a domain name is quite an easy process, I highly recommend using BigRock for both your hosting (hosting is required for your website) and your domain name as they will register a domain name for free. Also they have a cheap price and reliable service, but the most valuable asset is the ability to use the one account for unlimited domain names and websites, making it easier for you to build a niche site empire on the one account (and on a budget).

Once you've registered your domain name, and set up your hosting it's time to build the website. I recommend using Wordpress for your content management. If you're using Bigrock, you can install Wordpress quite easily through simple scripts, a tool in the control panel which makes installation as easy as a few clicks. Wordpress is a blogging platform, which is perfect for niche sites because Wordpress is coded extremely well, and is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). One Wordpress is installed, you can add pages and posts quite easily, with information to be found by your readers. The next step is get your website Search Engine Optimised, so visitors will find it quite easily on google.

>>> Tips to Maximize Your Interlink Efforts with SEO Power Pages

Using Good SEO to drive visitors

Getting your website to show up in the top of google under your keyword doesn't happen by accident. In order for you to get the traffic you need to make money from you site, you'll need to focus on good SEO. SEO can basically be broken up into 2 different categories - on site and off site. Let's start by focusing on onsite SEO.

Onsite SEO

You need to increase the density of your keyword in your website. Using the 'All in One SEO' plugin for WordPress (go to Plugins -> Add New -> Search for 'All in One SEO'), you can set up all of the meta data for your website. Use your keyword/s as early as possible in the Meta Title, Description and Keywords of your site. When setting up your page, make sure you use the <h1> title tags and insert your keyword as well as spread it through out your article text (in a way that reads naturally, keyword stuffing can get you penalised with google). Also be sure to include Alt tags for your images. Finally install the 'Google XML Sitemaps' plugin, to help index your site for SEO.

>>> Best On-Page SEO Methods for Your Website

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO refers mostly to backlinks (other websites that link to you) to your website. Backlinks are Google's way of seeing how popular your site is on the rest of the internet, but we can influence this by creating our own backlinks. Bookmark your site on Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and any other Social bookmarking sites you can find. Another step to getting quality backlinks is to submit some articles to websites like EzineArticles.com, Hubpages (you're on right now!) and many others. These article links are probably your best source of quality backlinks as they contain a quality writing relevant to your niche with a dofollow backlink. Yet another step is sign up for some free blogs and creating some posts about your niche, and inserting a link to your site from there, try Blogger and Wordpress.com for good results.

>>> The best places to get quality backlinks

Setting up adsense

Now that your website is populated with content, no longer under construction, you can now start implementing Google Adsense. Remember, it's vitally important to wait until after the rest of your site is finished to implement Adense, as Google's Terms of Service (which you should definitely read here, before starting) forbid you to use their ads on sites that are 'under construction'.

 

>>> Earn $4000 - $6000 Per Month Via AdSense

 

The next question is, how aggressive do you want your Adsense to be? While being highly aggressive with Adsense will get you clicks, it may effect the usability of the site and get you marked down by Google. So I suggest a mildy aggressive approach. Since people usually trust content more than side bars of a website, it's a good idea to add a right aligned 300 x 250 Ad unit at the start of the article (not above, but right aligned so they can still read the beginning of the article), and maybe another, smaller ad unit down the page. Try installing the 'wp-insert' plugin to insert the code automatically into all your posts. You can also add a third ad unit in your sidebar or anywhere else above the fold (the fold being the very bottom view-able area of the page when first loaded). Remember, you can only use 3 ad unit per page with adsense, after that you have the option of using Link Units. I highly recommend adding a 728 x 15 link unit near the navigation bar at the top of your page.

When creating these ads, try hard to make the link colors match those on your page, aswell as similar font, font size and spacing, so it looks a little more naturally, and not like a spammy ad dumped onto the page.

Now you're off! But what should you expect?

In reality, there's no telling what results you could expect. If you manage 100 visitors a day, and get a CTR (Click Through Rate) of 5%, earning you on average 50c a click - then you'll make, on average, $2.50 per day. It doesn't sound like much but that's $75 a month for little to no work once it's set up, all for $7 a month in hosting & domain name registration (even less if you use multiple domains on one hosting account). On top of this, you can do multiple adsense niche sites (with some people having as many as 100, raking in more than 10k a month!). You may find that your site doesn't make money, that's risk that you have to take with each niche site. Some are hit and miss, so have a few go's and you may hit a home run! Just give it a few months if things are moving slowly.

>>> What Are Meta Tags and How to Optimize Metadata for SEO

This guide covers covers only a miniature portion of everything there is to learn about niche sites, so I'd recommend that, with this in mind as a starting point, keep researching and looking for more information on SEO, Increasing Adsense Earnings, and general marketing. I hope this has helped to point you in the right direction. Cheers!