Yes, I still get the occasional letter from a reader of Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program telling me what they thought of the book and asking to take advantage of my free listing offer. Here's what reader Philip White has to say:

Your excellent book helped me in many ways. I've worked in IT for many years, and used the web for a long time, but I've never really bothered to find out how the web works till now. Your book was a great introduction to how the web works, and showed me a viable business model. It also gave me the momentum to take the first step, and removed a certain amount of fear.

It gave me a great introduction to the world of Google and AdSense, content, and site design. Maybe most importantly, the mechanics of how to build and host a site (I use Dreamweaver though, which works well most of the time).

I first read the book a couple of months ago, and have read several related books since. I spent much of the time designing and re-designing the site, and am now ready to start driving traffic before putting much more effort into expanding the content. Just this morning, I re-read the section on Google AdSense for search, and quickly wired it up. I'll be carefully following your advice in the “Traffic” section of the book today.

What I really liked about his letter, though, was this paragraph:

By the way, when I first picked up the book, I thought that the narrative format with Claude, Anita and Stef would drive me mad. Actually, it worked very well, so if you're considering a similar format for other books, then I suggest you use it again. If you ever want a pre-publication reviewer for a new book, I'd be happy to oblige

The narrative format has always been somewhat controversial. I know a lot of techies poo-pooed it in their reviews. But it works well for a lot of people. I chose the characters with the idea that most of the readers in my target audience (which is not the techie audience, not for that book — Uncommon AdSense is aimed at a different audience) could relate to one of the three main characters. Maybe I'll use the narrative form again for another book, who knows… I'm glad he liked it!

Anyhow, Philip wanted me to mention his new site, Sift and Sort, where he's putting up reviews and advice related to digital video recorders (DVRs). It's the beginning of a quality site with human-generated content, exactly what I recommend people do. I wish Philip well with his new endeavour.

Sponsored Link: Would you like a link back to your site from my PR 5/6 (it varies by datacenter) page? Buy a copy of Uncommon AdSense, apply it to a site you're building/fixing, and I'll be happy to publicize it here. That's a pretty good deal, plus you get a great book to read!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

As promised, we're continuing the new AdSense arbitrage experiment, this time following the techniques described in AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging. My earnings from this blog are usually lower on Fridays than on any other day of the week, so let's see if we can stir up some excitement

Niche Ideas

The first part of the technique is to generate ideas of niches to explore. Right now all we're looking for are potentially profitable niches, niches we think might lend themselves to arbitrage. Once we have a list of niches we'll do some analysis and figure out which ones we should pursue further and which we can immediately abandon.

There are lots of ways to build niche lists. Some are described in my free Profitable Niche Discovery email course. The method that Michael Plante recommends in his book is to subscribe to the NicheADay service, which is a free service from the Keyword Avalanche folks (though they don't advertise it as such). Every day one new niche idea lands in your mailbox, along with the occasional keyword-related product recommendation.

Here's an example of the email you get from NicheADay:

As promised, each and every day, like clockwork, you
will get a simple email like this one, exposing an
already tested profitable market that you can build a
niche site around.

Todays NicheADay niche is: surveillance

Estimated Overture Monthly traffic: 95956 	

High PPC Bid Price: $3.00

I have also attached a zip file of the top 1,000
keywords from Keyword Discovery, a database that
contains 32 billion keywords.

The ZIP file with the top 1000 keywords from Keyword Discovery is a fairly recent addition to the service. Inside the ZIP file is an Excel spreadsheet with related keywords, sorted by search count. Here's the top 5 from the “surveillance” list that was sent to me yesterday:

I haven't looked into it too closely to see what the search count represents exactly, that may be a yearly search count as opposed to the monthly search count shown in the email for the master term.

Here are some of the niche ideas that were sent out recently:

• surveillance
• software
• cruises
• wholesale
• vitamin supplements
• probate
• silver
• retirement

As you can see, they vary a lot.

Michael points out that this is just one way to find new niches to explore, and that there are many other ways to come up with interesting niche ideas — such as looking at the junk mail that comes to your door. (Don't bother with the junk email, though, stick to looking at physical junk mail.) He likes the service because it highlights niches that he would never have considered before. I agree, it's an easy way to get some ideas.

Once you've made a list of potential niches, it's time to start analyzing them for suitability.

But that will have to wait until next time.

By the way, even if AdSense arbitrage doesn't interest you, a service like NicheADay might be useful just to get you thinking about new niches for your content…

Sponsored Link: The AdSense leveraging ebook doesn't go much into the details of creating good AdWords campaigns, so you might consider buying an AdWords book for that. But which one? Read my recent AdWords book roundup to find out which one I recommend.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

We'll continue the arbitrage discussion later today, but first an aside.

One of my readers (both of this blog and of Uncommon AdSense) contacted me yesterday looking for some SEO (search engine optimization) advice for his friend's travel site. No, it didn't really have to do anything with AdSense per se, because AdSense isn't usually suitable when you're selling products and services — the point, after all, is to convert visitors into buyers, not to send them to a competitor's site. Adding eBay auction listings to your site and mixing in AdSense ads make sense because you're not actually selling anything in either case. But when you're selling your own things, you want visitors to linger as long as possible.

Travel is a very competitive field to be in, so optimization of on-page elements — the things that are completely in your control like page title, page URL, links to other pages, headings, body text, meta tags — isn't enough to rank well in the search engines. You also need links to your site from other, relevant sites, ideally with good keywords in the anchor text of those links.

One of the easiest ways to get quality links back to your site is to write quality articles for distribution via article directories like EZineArticles and SearchWarp. You can also place free ads with links back to your site on places like USFreeAds and Google Base. I devote a chapter of Uncommon AdSense to this and call it “Write Articles for Karma”, because that's what you're doing, essentially. You don't get compensated for those articles. But you can link back to your site(s) in the resource box at the bottom of each article. Write enough articles and you'll start accumulating a critical mass of links.

I'm not the only proponent of article writing. The controversial affiliate marketing book Affiliate “Project X” recommends article writing as an easy to get traffic to an affiliate pre-sell page.

In this reader's particular case it should be easy to write a series of travel-related articles that link back to the site in question. People are always looking for travel advice, so there's a good market for travel articles. Definitely worth the effort.

One of the things I'm going to be doing soon is writing more articles to promote Uncommon AdSense. There's already an article out about high-paying AdSense keywords. I have an old article called The AdSense Formula For Making Money that needs a bit of minor updating. I've even done the odd article promoting some of my other sites, such as one on debt-free living (someone took me to task about that one recently, stating that debt for investment purposes makes a lot of sense tax-wise, but that's not a topic for here). You can even publish different variations of the same article in different directories, such as this one on making money via eBay's affiliate program.

If you're a subject matter expert — which is what you're going to be if you're building quality AdSense sites — writing articles shouldn't bee too difficult. If you've got a blog, for example, go back and re-purpose some of your earlier writings. Don't just copy them as is, rewrite them a bit and then submit them as stand-alone articles to article directories.

Article writing does take work — time, if nothing else — but it can really pay off over the long term. Get started today!

Sponsored Link: Get more great AdSense tips and techniques from Uncommon AdSense, my new ebook about AdSense.

P.S.: I've just used a specific technique I described a couple of days ago right here in this blog. Do you know what it is?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.