Time to get started with building our VRE empire! That means creating the first site.
What’s Your Passion?
You’re probably expecting a long thesis on keyword research and finding the best niche for your empire. But that’s not at all what we’re going to do.
The first site in your AdSense network should be about a topic that’s interesting to you on a personal level. Forget about mortgage consolidation, mesothelioma, or those other “high click value” topics.
On a piece of paper, write a list of topics. Each topic in your list should be something that you can write about with minimal research: a hobby, a skill, an expertise… whatever turns your crank.
Now go through the list and prioritize them based on interest, with the most interesting topic at the top of the list.
Finally, run through the list and stroke off the ones with no or few advertisers using the simple test explained below.
What you’re left with are the initial sites you’ll create for your AdSense network.
Why do it this way? It removes mental roadblocks. If you start with a topic you know nothing about, you’ll just won’t be as interested in getting your network up and running. You’ll have to do some research, so you’ll put it off. Or you’ll get started and other things will distract you because you’re not that interested, leaving you with a half-finished site. Hey, I know, I’ve been there!
Start with your passions, even if they’re never going to be big moneymakers. Get a few sites off the ground, then focus your efforts more on the money side.
The Quick AdSense-No-Go Test
There are some topics, of course, that should ALWAYS be avoided. Anything that contradicts the AdSense program policies is a no-go.
You’ll also want to avoid topics with few or no advertisers. The easiest way to do this is with Google’s own AdWords ad preview tool. The ad preview tool lets AdWords advertisers see what ads are shown given a search query, a Google domain, a geographic area, and a language.
Set the preview tool to show results in the language, geography and domain of the typical visitor you’re targeting. For many of us that would be the google.com domain from English-speaking United States.
Now type in a keyword or phrase related to the topic of your putative site and press the “Preview Ads” button. Look at the sponsored links section on the right side of the resulting search results page. If there are less than four ads, that’s not good.
The ideal situation is to see a “More Sponsored Links” link immediately below the ads, which happens when there are more than 8 advertisers bidding on the term. That’s good!
Repeat this process with other keywords related to your site. You want to get a feel for whether or not there are AdWords advertisers bidding on the keywords that relate to your potential site. If there are just a few advertisers, skip the topic: remember that many advertisers skip the content network (AdSense sites like ours) when targeting their ads, so if only a few ads show up there may in fact be none available for AdSense publishers to display.
As a final sanity check for English topics, head over to EzineArticles and search for articles with matching topics. See if the AdSense ads that accompany those articles are on-topic. If they’re not, skip the topic.
Plan Out Your First Site
Once you’ve got your list of topics, take the first topic and sketch out the site you want to develop. At a minimum, the site should contain the following:
- Five to ten pages of content
- A human-readable sitemap (a list of the pages on your site)
- An XML sitemap (so the search engines can easily find all your pages)
- A privacy policy (required by AdSense)
- An “about” page
- An RSS feed
You’ll also have to find a suitable domain name, which can be hard. All the obvious ones are surely taken, so you’ll have to spend some time to find a domain name that has a topic-related keyword in it. And you’ll have to decide whether or not you want to go with a private domain registration.
If you’ve truly chosen a topic that interests you, coming up with the initial pages of content should be easy. The rest of the stuff depends on how you’re building the site. It’s quite easy to build such a site with WordPress and a few well-chosen plugins. You can also build the site with my PLRSiteBuilder software.
That’s it for today. Next, I reveal the topic I’ve chosen for my first site and I’ll even build it in front of your eyes.
I appreciate the information on you blog as I am always looking to learn new things in genera
Eric, Have there been any updates to your PLR site builder?
The last public version was 1.2.4, however I’m preparing a small update with some minor fixes… and I imagine I’ll be fixing other things as I use it in public to create the sites for this series!
I am very disappointed by AdSense. I am still in the process of testing different layouts and topics, but altogether it’s lame. You have to have a very big number of visitors to even cover your hosting expenses.
Vlad, there is some truth in what you say, and I’ve said it here before. You do need a lot of traffic, which is why we’re building ourselves a network here…
Eric
start from passion, i am very agree with this . thank you for reminding
Congratulations. That is a very well written workflow for picking a niche.
Another benefit of writing about a passion is you already know the vocabulary and jargon of the niche so you use it in your writing. Without any extra effort that creates a lot of long tail keywords. We have sites where 70% or more of the traffic comes from the long tail with search terms we never imagined would be used. That makes your traffic and income much less sensitive to the ebb and flow of a few words or phrases.
What is your niche…that is the first critical question people forget to ask
you right, but how to compete among 10 millions competitor with the same keywords hunt?
The adwords keyword tool whilst providing a good indication of the ads available, is really only a guide, no?
You’re making an assumption that advertisers who buy ads on the search network are also buying ads on the content network.
What’s the difference between white hat and black hat?
@Holiday Cottages
White hat means you would be happy to explain in detail exactly what you are doing to a Google search engineer (Matt Cutts for example).
Black hat means you would hide if you see him coming and every morning you would wake up wondering if your techniques had tripped a filter at Google that got your sites banned.
@Bisnis: Don’t worry about the competition too much for your first one or two sites. The point is get your site up and running. It probably won’t be a big moneymaker, but it’ll get you started and will eventually provide some linking power if nothing else. We’ll explore competitive issues later in the series.
@SD: I did say that not all advertisers who advertise on Google also advertise on AdSense sites. That’s why you want to find topics that show a lot of advertisers…. more chance that some of them will advertise using AdSense. Plus the EzineArticles sanity check helps with that, too.
@Paul: Couldn’t have said it better myself!
White hat techniques are ethical methods of SEO, methods that are tried and true and not frowned upon. Blackhat techniques are more unethical, and usually have quicker results, however can get you in trouble with the search engines and are not recommended.
Hi Eric
You say not to go with a topic that has less than four competing adword campaigns for it. I can see that it’s cause for concern, but surely less competition is better?? You may have found something that no one else has yet?? It’s just a case of getting a balance of something that everyone else isn’t going for and that might pay enough money to make it worthwhile.
Lee
Lee, this is different from looking at competition from the advertiser’s point of view. You need a topic that has advertisers, because that’s where the AdSense ads come from. No advertisers, no relevant ads…
Eric
you right, but how to compete among 10 millions competitor with the same keywords hunt?