More AdSense niche pouncing

I've had some questions asking for clarification of what I said in Pounce on that niche!, so let's revisit the topic.

One of the questions was why, when using the AdWords keyword tool, did I find a niche with low advertiser volume interesting? Here's the screenshot again demonstrating what I mean:

Note the highlighted area, the one with essentially non-existent advertiser competition. Yes, you'd think that would be bad — generally speaking, the more advertisers there are for a given keyword, the higher the payout for that keyword. So in a perfect world, you want to find keywords with high advertiser competition and high search volume: lots of people searching for terms and lots of advertisers bidding on them. But things are rarely perfect.

Ultimately, making money with AdSense is about targeted traffic. (Read my free e-book the two words that can make you rich for more on this.) One of the best sources of targeted traffic — some would say the best source for AdSense purposes — are the search engines. Traffic due to search engine queries is naturally targeted. Remember that AdSense considers search engine referrals when selecting ads — this is buried in the AdSense patent. (The ads you see on a page may be different if you land on the page via a search engine query, because AdSense has additional context information — what was the user really searching for? — to bolster the ad selection algorithm. You can get my free special report on the AdSense patent just by downloading the free e-book I just mentioned.)

So if the keyword's search volume is high, I may not care if the advertiser competition is low, because there are people actively searching for that keyword. Low advertiser competition may also (but not necessarily!) mean that there are fewer pages in the search engine indexes targeting that keyword. This means that you may have a real opportunity to create targeted content that ranks highly for that keyword. Which means you can grab some of that search engine traffic. Which increases the number of clicks you'll get. Which means more money for you, even with a low per-click cost.

Remember that in Pounce on that niche! I said you should use other metrics to confirm that the niche is viable. Low advertiser competition in and of itself is not sufficient; it's a starting point for a more detailed keyword exploration. You still have to do some legwork!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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