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.

1. 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.
2. Go the AdWords keyword tool and select Website content under How would you like to generate keyword ideas?
3. 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
4. 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.

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.