This tutorial is part of an email course I’m developing on creating niche websites. So if it seems like it’s a tutorial out of the blue, that’s why. It makes more sense in the context of the email course, but I thought that my readers might get some use out of it even without the course itself.
Part of picking a topic for a niche website is making sure we’ll be able to profit from the site. We’ve already seen that one way to profit is by selling ads.
In the early days of a niche website, the easiest way to sell advertising space is through Google Adsense. If you don’t have an Adsense account, don’t worry…it’s far too early in the process to actually place ads on your site, and you’ll need to have a site up before applying to Adsense. A later lesson will talk about the right time for getting signed up to Adsense.
We can pretty easily check the amount that we would be paid per click for Adsense ads, by using the Google Traffic Estimator tool. That link opens in a new window so you can follow along here.
You’ll end up at a fairly complex screen. In the topmost box, enter all of your main topic keywords.
Down at the bottom, click the “Add” button to add “All Countries and Territories”, then click the “Continue>>” button. For the three main topic keywords I’ve been using as examples in these tutorials, what shows is this:
What I can see from this is the average amount of money that an advertiser will spend to get a single person to click on an Adsense ad. The “golf swing” topic seems to be the most profitable, given the same search volume and conversion rate, with “board games” being next, then “sewing patterns”.
This isn’t to say that board games and sewing patterns couldn’t be profitable topics! Adsense is only one way of monetizing a site. So it’s one indicator of a site’s profitability. We’ll look at other indicators as we go along, to come up with an overall sense of which topic would be most profitable.
For my own sites, I would want the main site keyword to command at least $1 Adsense clicks to conclude that Adsense is a viable means of profiting from the site. So as I continue to look at these niches, I’d want to see some other monetization options for board games and sewing patterns.
Next time around we’ll look at evaluating the product potential for the same site topics.