Gone Fishing
In a few hours I’ll be leaving on a vacation to Paris. I won’t be bringing my laptop or my BlackBerry, so I’m going to shortly switch the blog to moderate all comments until I return. So don’t expect much activity for a couple of weeks, though there will be a few posts that will pop up now and then, if I can get them done in time… See you in September!
How Much Of The Web Do You Own?
A recent post by Google stated that they now have over a trillion unique pages in the Google search index. That made me wonder — how much of the Web do I own, exactly? A quick calculation showed me the answer: not enough!
Anyhow, I put together a silly little online tool called How Much Of The Web Do You Own? that you can use to determine your own percentage. First calculate how many pages you have on all your sites — use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to get the numbers, it’s more accurate than Google’s site: command — and plug that number into the tool. Then bash your head against the desk…
Think of it from the AdSense publisher’s perspective. If each page you own (and “own” can be defined pretty loosely to mean any page which you can monetize via AdSense) makes you an average of 1 cent per day (I’m just pulling that number from a hat), then 100 pages doesn’t make you much — a whole $1/day. You need to get up to 10,000 pages to start seeing a significant amount of $100/day. Just think of what you could make with a million or so pages…
PLRPro Backdoor Special
PLRPro is the PLR (private label rights) content service I recommend for serious Internet marketing. They closed their doors recently to new members ahead of implementing a whole slew of new services for members, due out next month. For a few days, however, there’s a PLRPro backdoor special being run that lets you into PLRPro at $127/month. The regular price for the upgraded PLRPro service will be $197/month, so if you’ve been wavering on the fence about this one then you might want to grab the backdoor special before it’s gone.
Yes, I am a member. All existing members will get grandfathered into the upgraded service and won’t have to pay the newer monthly rate, which is essentially double the old rate of $97/month.
Note that you don’t get access to the new PLRPro services until next month. You do get access to the PLRPro content, though, for the current month and all subsequent months until you cancel. You also get access to some members-only blogs and article directories for getting backlinks to your sites and various books and forum postings on how to do things, including a nice little book on setting up your own VRE (virtual real estate) network of sites. Just remember my tip on profitable AdSense article marketing if you’re going to rewrite some of the articles for submission to article directories in order to drive traffic to your AdSense sites.
If any PLRPro subscribers are reading this, feel free to leave a comment detailing your experiences with the service. On the whole I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s not the only program out there, but it seems to be one of the best.
P.S.: I should also mention that PLRPro also has an ebook service which is quite good. Each month you get 3 ebooks complete with (and this is what I really like) an audio version of the book, 4 different websites for selling it, an autoresponder sequence, a teaser ebook for giveaways (to encourage people to subscribe to your autoresponder), a custom WordPress blog theme and a bunch of articles for traffic purposes. If you join PLRPro you get access to the ebook service for $42/month more.
How To Squeeze Out More Keywords From The AdWords Keyword Tool
A very short tip about the AdWords keyword tool — which is free to use, as I keep mentioning, no AdWords account needed. (If you do have an AdWords account, though, might as well log into the account and use it from there, you won’t have to prove you’re human.)
Normally, the AdWords keyword tool gives you at most 200 keyword ideas. What most people don’t know is that the list of keywords can vary on each request. So by running the tool multiple times on the same keyword you can generate a slightly larger set of keywords.
Here are the steps:
- Search for a keyword (or analyze a site)
- Scroll through the results and click all the Add all links so all the keywords end up in the list on the righthand side of the browser window
- Go back to the top and hit the Get keyword ideas button again.
- Scroll through the results. Any new keywords not already in the list will be obvious, since they’re in blue and the other ones are in grey.
- Repeat this process until you don’t get any more keywords. Try checking or unchecking the Use synonyms option while doing this to get even more keywords.
The only downside with this approach is that when you move the keywords over into the righthand side you lose all the search and competition data. If you plan on analyzing the data, you’ll want to download the spreadsheet format for the keyword data after each press of the Get keyword ideas. You’ll then have to merge the data into one big spreadsheet.
Profitable AdSense Article Marketing
As promised, here’s a tip on how to do effective article marketing with the help of the free free AdWords keyword tool. As I’ve mentioned before, article writing and submission is a simple and cost-effective way to get links and traffic to your AdSense pages. But you can profit more from the traffic if you do it right.
The idea is very simple: buy low, sell high. You write two sets of content for a given topic/niche: one set (the traffic set) is for distribution on other sites, the other set (the money set) is for publication on your own site. The traffic set targets low-paying (but often high-traffic) keywords, the money set targets the higher-paying keywords.
Let’s use the broad topic of cooking as an example. Type cooking into the AdWords keyword tool and sort the results by search volume and you’ll get something like this:
Many cooking terms aren’t going to pay you much per-click — remember, the values you see here are what AdWords advertisers pay to have their ads shown on Google, the earnings AdSense publishers make from ads will be much lower. What we’re looking for are relative values, however. Here’s how I’d group the keywords shown above:
| Traffic Set | Money Set |
| cooking turkey | cooking schools |
| cooking recipes | cooking school |
| home cooking | cooking classes |
| cooking online | cooking class |
| cooking | cooking com |
I’ve arbitrarily chosen the $2 mark as the cutoff between the two sets: keywords in the traffic set have values less than $2, those in the money set have values more than $2. Notice how the traffic keywords are generally about “do-it-yourself” cooking and the money keywords are about formal cooking instruction.
For traffic, then, write articles about recipes and cooking techniques and distribute them using EzineArticles, iSnare, and other article directories and submission services. For example, “How To Cook A Turkey” would target the “cooking turkey” keyword. On the other hand, for your own site/blog you’d want to write an article like “Cooking Classes Are For Everyone” to target the “cooking classes” and “cooking class” keywords.
The trick that makes this all work is to link the traffic article to the money article with a carefully-worded resource box:
To wow your company next Thanksgiving, take a cooking class and learn how to cook a turkey with all the trimmings. Find cooking classes near you with our national listing of cooking schools.
Notice the use of “cooking class” and “cooking schools” in the link anchor text. While the body of the article focuses on turkey cooking, the resource box focuses on the cooking classes. The two links should go directly to a page (or pages) relating to formal cooking instruction. Thus you get SEO benefits from the article (links to your pages with the all-important money keywords) and very targeted traffic (anyone who clicks the links to visit your site).
If you’ve chosen good money keywords, your per-click earnings should be much higher than they’d be if you’d just blindly targeted high-traffic keywords. (Don’t feel sad for the article directory: the directory will also make money, of course, because some of the readers will click ads on the directory site, but not as much as your pages will… although they’ll probably make more in terms of sheer volume.)
That, my friends, is the key to profitable AdSense article marketing.
What Does Google Think Your Page Is About?
In my previous post, How To Find Profitable Niches, I showed how to use the free AdWords keyword tool to find new topic ideas using high-traffic news and general interest sites. But the tool has other uses.
The most interesting use from an AdSense publisher’s perspective is to see what Google thinks your site is about. Actually, it can be more specific than that — you can use the keyword tool to determine what Google thinks of an individual page.
Take All About CRM, a demo site I created with PLRSiteBuilder. If I run its homepage through the keyword tool, I end up with an extensive list of keywords grouped under the following primary keywords:
- customer service
- crm software
- small business
- customer relation
- crm
- customer
- software
Some miscellaneous keywords are also in the list. Most of the keywords are in the CRM category (CRM = customer relationship management), which is what I want. But not all of the keywords it lists are ones I want to target — customer service is too broad a topic, for example. This tool makes it easy to discover if your site is properly targeted or not.
It’s also a good way to determine if your topics are search-worthy or not. Plug in the URL for the Alaska Ferry Travel site and you see keywords like this:
As you can see, the site is right on target keyword-wise, but many of those keywords don’t get a lot of searches.
But so what? If those keywords are super targeted and you can get ranked for them, the small stream of traffic they generate is probably worth more than any other traffic stream.
Contrast those stats to those for the DUI Attorney Finder:
The search numbers here aren’t that hot, either — how many people other than search marketers are really looking for help with drunk driving charges? But look at the competition numbers — way higher. Just from this fact alone you can deduce that per-click revenues for “DUI attorney” type content is going to be much higher than “Alaska ferry” — and much harder to break into.
The ideal is to find keywords that have high search numbers and low competition numbers… while still being profitable. That’s really tricky, because those keywords are far and few between. It requires legwork.
Next we’ll take a look at how to use the keyword tool for effective article marketing.
How To Find Profitable Niches
Many AdSense publishers find themselves looking for new topic ideas from time to time. Here’s a quick and easy way to find new niches to explore that relies on the AdWords keyword tool (which is free) and various popular news/interest sites (also free). This techniques give you broad ideas for profitable niches, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth pursuing or not.
- Build yourself a list of popular news and general interest sites, high-traffic sites whose content changes a lot and is geared towards a general audience. Sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia and CNN fit the bill. If you’re a techie you might also want to throw in more techie-oriented sites like News.com.
- Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
- Now on the right type in the URL of one of the sites in your list, being sure to check Include other pages on my site linked from this URL
- Press the Get keyword ideas button. The keyword tool will crunch away for a minute and analyze the content of the site you gave it to come up with a list of relevant keywords complete with bidding costs and search volumes.
So what do you do with this information? Some people will tell you to enter a large value for the maximum CPC bid to see which of the niches pay a lot per click. You can do this, but take the values you see with a grain of salt — see my high-paying AdSense keyword lists series for the reasons why. Don’t worry too much about maximum values. Look more at volume and competition estimates. Try bidding down the CPC value to see at what point bid positions shift from the 1-3 range to the 4-6 range.
The goal here is to come up with ideas for things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself while avoiding niches that are obviously going to pay you just a few cents per click. Do this procedure for each of your news/interest sites and do it over the span of a few days and you should come across several potential niche ideas that hold promise.
How to Find Your Site’s Position in Google Search Results
Some readers asked me how I could tell where my site ranked for a given keyword. It’s actually very easy to do with the right tools. There are two ways.
The first is to use my free Rank Checker tool. It’s a desktop application where you feed it a bunch of URLs and a bunch of keywords and it tells you which URLs rank for which keywords. I released it as a “mystery tool”, and I might still charge for it, so get it now while it’s free…
Anyhow, the other way to do it involves these steps:
- Start a copy of Firefox.
- If you haven’t already, install the SEO Tools for Firefox add-in. (You’ll have to restart Firefox.)
- Go to the Google home page and click the Preferences link. Set the preferences to display 100 results per page and save the preferences.
- Make sure the SEO Tools plugin is enabled — the “SEO” icon in the bottom right of the status bar should be in color.
- Search Google for the keyword/phrase of interest. You’ll see a bunch of extra information at the bottom of each item in the Google results page. These are inserted automatically by the SEO Tools extension. Right now you’re mainly interested in the position, i.e. “#1″, “#2″, etc.
- Hit CTRL+F to bring up the Firefox search box. Type in the start of the URL you’re interested in tracking. (If I want to see what position this blog is in, I just look for memwg.com.) After typing in the URL (or partial URL), click the “Next” button immediately to the right of the search bar.
- If your URL is in the results, you’ll jump immediately to it and see what position you’re at.
- If not, go to the next page of the results and click the Next button again. Repeat this process as many times as necessary until you either find your site or run out of results.
The key is the 100 results per page setting — it makes the process much less tedious.
Don’t forget that the results you see are dependent on which Google site you’re using, what language you’re targeting, etc.