As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I decided to do another AdSense case study, much as I did with the electronic pet fence guide. As before, I'll walk you through the steps necessary to build a functioning and ultimately profitable AdSense travel site.
Preliminaries
The ideal AdSense travel site is a site whose content is based on your own travel experiences. The travel niche is clogged with content from the big players. Travel portals, official government tourism sites, travel guide publishers — they've got a lot of info out there and it's tough to compete against them for general stuff.
So what do you do? The most successful AdSense sites are the ones that are heavily trafficed or that have extremely targeted traffic. Getting tons of traffic is hard, so generally you go the opposite way and drill down into your niche. Concentrate on a specific aspect of your travels, not the destination in its entirety. What did you do that was really fun? What did you like or dislike about the destination? Did you partake in some interesting events? (If you can't come up with anything good, you might want to rethink your vacations!)
And whatever you do, take lots of pictures when you travel. They'll come in handy both as eye candy for the site and as a way to generate some traffic from sites like Flickr. You can even get your kids to take pictures, too. We bought a Fisher Price Kid Tough digital camera for our seven-year-old daughter and she loved using it. (She actually preferred the boy version, but there's also a pink version for girls available. I also recommend you get the matching case, also available either in blue or pink, for extra protection.) Be sure to put a large memory card in the camera!
There are other kinds of similarly durable cameras available for young children. Older kids can use inexpensive cameras — Amazon has a surprising number of digital cameras for less than $100 available, most of which are perfectly adequate for pictures that are to be uploaded or printed on small photo sheets.
The Right Domain
After your trip's over, it's time to look over the pictures and notes you took and decide what you're going to focus on. Then you have to decide where you're going to put the information. Some people just add pages to an existing site or blog. Some create a new subdomain. Some buy a new domain. There are pros and cons to each approach, but generally I'd go either for a subdomain or a new domain. If you already have a travel-themed site or blog then maybe the material would fit well in it, but it's generally not a good idea to mix travel with non-travel content. After all, you're targeting different audiences.
If you choose to create a subdomain on an existing domain, your naming choices are pretty much unlimited. (Be careful with trademarks, though.) If you plan on creating several travel sites, it may make sense to go the subdomain route to save on domain name costs — buy a generic travel domain and use the subdomains to define the niche for each site. Make sure your subdomain includes important keywords, like the name of the destination.
For new sites, though, finding a good travel name is tough. Most of the “obvious” names — say name of city plus “travel” — are taken. Check for them anyhow, but chances are you'll have to come up with something else. One place to get ideas is to use my Google Suggest Explorer tool. Type in the destination name and see what searches it suggests. Use this as the starting point for your domain search. If you can include a highly-searched-for phrase in your domain name, all the better, it makes for better targeting of traffic and ads.
That's all for this time. Stay tuned for Part 2…
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not ask Technorati to fix their broken tracking system!