AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging Experiment: Niche Research

Sorry for the delay in making this posting, obviously I got distracted by various things over the last few days. But today we're going to continue with the AdSense arbitrage experiment where we're following the arbitrage method described in the AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging ebook. We've done the first step, which was to collect niche ideas. Now we're on to the second step, which is researching and analyzing the niche ideas to find the ones that hold the most promise from an arbitrage sense.

Note: Michael Plante, the author of AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging, has just released an update to his book that handles the recent “demise” of the Overture keyword tool, which he previously used for part of his arbitrage keyword research process. If you own the book, be sure to get and read the updated version.

Niche Keyword Research

As I mentioned before in my review of AdSense Arbitrage and Leveraging, Michael Plante's book makes extensive use of the Keyword Elite software application, although the latest edition does have examples with other tools like the free Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you don't have KE and want to duplicate what I'm doing, you'll need to either purchase the product (it's not cheap, unfortunately, but a lot of people swear by it, which is unusual — it's more common for users to swear at software) or else look around for free/low-cost alternatives. The ones I suggest you start with are the Wordtracker tool mentioned above and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool.

In our last episode we generated a list of potential niches:

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

These are very broad topics, but that's good. You want broad, competitive topics to start with: you need a topic with a lot of advertisers in it clamoring for traffic and willing to pay for it. But not every broad topic is suitable. So let's do some analysis.

Michael's original method involved taking each keyword/keyphrase and using Project 1 of Keyword Elite to generate a keyword list based on that keyword/keyphrase. For example, if I take surveillance, here are the first 10 phrases in my keyword list:

• aids surveillance
• audio surveillance
• behavioral risk factor surveillance
• casino surveillance
• cctv surveillance
• cell phone surveillance
• computer surveillance
• counter surveillance
• covert surveillance
• digital surveillance

Of course, which keyword source you use will affect what the list looks like. The list above was generated using KE's Google Suggest option. Using the Ask.com option generates this list:

• advanced spy equipment
• audio surveillance equipment
• camera surveillance
• camera surveillance software
• cctv surveillance systems
• codes of practice for covert surveillance
• cool spy gadgets
• counter surveillance
• counter surveillance equipment
• covert audio recording

It's actually a broader list with more lateral terms — the term “surveillance” isn't in each keyphrase like it is with Google Suggest.

Once you had a list, in the original edition you used a different KE project to see how popular search-wise those terms are. The newest edition of the book actually recommends using the Wordtracker tool, which gives me this list:

• video surveillance
• church video surveillance
• church video surveillance system
• surveillance
• surveillance camera
• surveillance cameras
• surveillance equipment
• surveillance detection training
• video surveillance equipment
• security surveillance

This Wordtracker list is quite different in the sense that it's ordered by number of searches in the past six months. The other two lists shown above (remember, I'm only showing the top 10 values in each list) are ordered alphabetically only, because a second step is needed to determine the search volumes. However, given that KE is using Wordtracker itself for search data now (since Overture is no longer available), KE users should come up with similar results. (But KE lets you build longer lists than the free Wordtracker tool.)

I should point out here that there's no right or wrong way to build these keyword lists. Use the tools you have at your disposal along with common sense. (Michael also recommends a free keyword tool called Good Keywords.) Run the same keywords through multiple tools and see what they all say and use your intuition/gut to refine your choices if there's no clear winner.

In Michael's book you take the top N keyphrases by search volume and use these as your main keywords on which to base both your AdSense content and your AdWords ad groups. (I remind you that I'm leaving out some details throughout this process as it's not fair to Michael to divulge everything he talks about in his ebook.) Let's take the original set of niches and look at the top two derived keyphrases for each:

video surveillance	1250
church video surveillance	835
free software	4049
tax software	2828
carnival cruise	2310
cruise lines	2261
wholesale handbags	938
wholesale jewelry	910
daily vitamin supplements	91
nutritional supplements vitamin supplements	89
probate law	105
probate court	75
silver bells	2698
silver jewelry	1793
retirement calculator	1423
retirement planning	772

Again, you have to do some pruning of terms using your common sense. For the “cruises” keyword, for example, “tom cruise” was ahead of the two shown above, but that's obviously not the kind of cruise we're looking for…

Also, Michael's method depends on being able to develop multiple word keyphrases with high search volumes, so I purposely left out the search stats for the original niche keywords themselves.

As you can plainly see, there's a wide variation in these daily search estimates for these different niches. Software is at the top — lots of people looking for free software especially, which is no surprise — and at the bottom are the vitamin supplements.

As an additional sanity check, you might consider plugging the phrases you come up with into the AdWords keyword tool and seeing if the monthly keyword search volume it shows (which isn't a number, just a bar graph) lines up with what Wordtracker is saying.

Now you should choose the niche(s) you want to target and then develop further keyword lists based on those keywords. We'll leave that for next time.

Crass Advertisement: Buy Keyword Elite through my affiliate link and I'll send you a free copy of Uncommon AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (which means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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