Writing for Your Wealth

This is Part 2 of the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series, and today we’re talking about how to choose a profitable niche.

If you’re planning to build article sites and make money through Adsense or affiliate programs, choosing a good niche and taking advantage of the right keywords is important.

Blogs and big sites that will continue to grow and gain authority status over the years can often get away with a brand or other non-keyword-rich domain name, but with article sites your goal is to rise to the top of the search engines without constantly adding new content and getting new links. You’ll want to do a little work now and then, to keep the money flowing, but we’re really looking to build a site and then spend only an hour or so a month on upkeep.

Before we pick our keywords, though, we need to think about our niche.

Brainstorming niche ideas

As I’ve mentioned before, the key to doing well with Adsense is to choose a consumer-oriented niche. Whatever you write about should have products and services related to it, otherwise nobody is going to want to spend big money advertising on your site.

I’m taking tennis lessons right now, so I’m going to use tennis as an example and see if there’s some aspect of my hobby I can exploit (it’s less important with small sites to choose a subject you’re passionate about, but it always makes the writing process easier if you have some interest in the topic!).

Using “tennis” as an example

As you might guess, tennis itself is too broad a topic for a small article site. It might be great for a blog, where you need to churn out content day in and day out, but we’re only thinking of writing say 15 or 20 core articles to start with and maybe only one a month after the initial site has been built.

Also, tennis itself may or may not be related to consumer products. If I’m writing about tennis news, I’ll attract fans who enjoy the game, but what I really want to attract are people who want to buy tennis products and services, such as rackets, club memberships, lessons, clothing, etc.

I could do a site that provides consumer information on all tennis products, but based on what I know of the game, I don’t think most products are going to be linked to advertisers who pay a lot per click with Adsense. Nobody is going to pay a dollar a click to sell a $3 can of tennis balls!

To do well with article sites, which won’t get the kind of huge traffic of a blog with thousands of posts, we need to choose topics that are associated with high paying Adsense clicks. (For those who are interested in marketing affiliate products, the same rules would apply: you want to write about high ticket products that offer sizable affiliate commissions.)

What we need is a tool that lets us know roughly how much advertisers are bidding for keywords in our niche. Fortunately, Google is willing to provide us with just such a tool right on their site.

The Adwords Keyword Tool is great for brainstorming keywords and checking out their profit potential. We can also get an idea for how many people are searching for information on these terms each month.

Using the keyword tool is fairly self-explanatory. Type in some terms related to your niche, and click “Get keyword ideas.”

You can see the search I just ran. From the “Choose columns to display” drop down menu, I selected “Show Estimated Avg. CPC” (CPC is “cost per click”) to see how much advertisers are bidding on these keywords (to have their ads display when someone searches for these terms in Google). Then, at the top of the results table, I clicked on Estimated Avg. CPC to sort the results, with the highest bids at the top.

How much should keyword bids be to be worthwhile?

I was actually pretty wowed by the $19 bids for tennis ball machines. Then I looked up ball machines and found out they cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Merchants can afford to bid high because they will make a nice profit on the sale of a machine.

When it comes to article sites, I generally find anything that has high bids over $5 to be worth following up on.

Note, just because you see $10 or $20 bids showing up with this keyword tool doesn’t mean you’re going to make $10 or $20 a click from ads displayed on your site. This tool shows what the top bidders are paying for clicks from the ads displayed next to the search engine results.

Not all merchants bid high, and overall advertisers pay less for ads displayed on the content network (sites like you and I build), since these don’t convert as well for them. But seeing high bids here lets you know you’re probably going to get clicks in the dollar and up range, at least some of the time, rather than being stuck averaging five cents (or less) per click.

If you’re making a dollar a click, even if your site only gets five or ten clicks a day, that can add up to some great passive income over time, especially if you have a handful of sites seeing these kinds of returns.

By cherry picking these keywords, you don’t need a site that gets a lot of traffic every day to do well. And the great thing about these simple article sites is that they don’t cost much to run, so you don’t have to make a lot to cover your costs.

I have a $15/month hosting package that allows me to make multiple sites with multiple domains, and I’m not anywhere near using up the allotted space (content-based sites don’t take up much server space) or bandwidth allowance, even though I make $X,XXX a month from those sites.

How many searches does a keyword need to get a month?

In the earlier picture, you might have noticed there aren’t a lot of people searching for tennis ball machines each month, especially compared to other terms.

Here I changed the sorting method. Now we’re looking at the most searched terms per month. While “tennis” gets a lot of searches, those ball machines don’t show up anywhere near the top of the list (they’re way down below the cut off in this picture).

That’s not unexpected though. After all, how many people do you know with their own ball machine?

Fortunately, a low amount of searches can be absolutely fine for a small article site. While you’re not going to want to waste your time building a site that only gets 300 searches a month throughout the entire Google search network, something that gets 10,000 or 50,000 may be worth targeting, especially if there isn’t a lot of existing competition.

Speaking of competition, let’s see what’s out there in the “tennis ball machine” world already.

Scoping out the Competition

It’s definitely worth taking a look at the search engine results for your new niche before getting married to the idea of building a site. Let’s take a peek at what comes up in Google when I search for those ball machines (you can also check out the other search networks, too, as rankings will differ in MSN, Yahoo!, etc. and those sites will account for some of your traffic):

I’m liking what I’m seeing. Here’s why:

• Amazon and Nextag pages come up near the top — If you do a search and an Amazon page comes up at the top, you know no one is trying very hard to optimize for this term. Yes, Amazon is an authority site, but chances are they’re not out there trying to build links to this page in particular. For someone who is willing to put in some SEO effort, this position can be surpassed.

• Most results don’t have the keywords in the domain name — While it’s certainly possible to rank for terms without having the keywords in the URL, it definitely helps. Put your keywords–in this case “tennis ball machines”–in the domain name, and you’ll have an edge when it comes to ranking for that term.
• The top sites are all manufacturers or distributors of tennis ball machines — A lot of people use search engines when they’re looking for information as a preliminary to making a purchase. If the top 10 sites are all merchant sites, you could actually say there’s a need for an unbiased information site in the top. Once you get high enough to be noticed by searchers with blogs, you might get some free links to your site simply because you provide helpful consumer information in a sea of sites trying to sell you something.

So, will tennis ball machines be a profitable niche?

Based on everything we’ve looked at here, I would go ahead and give a tennis ball machine site a try if I were looking to build more article sites right now.

Of course, even with this research, I can’t know for sure that it’d be a big winner, but I’ve yet to build an article site that didn’t make at least some money every month (though it can take a few months to get the needed traffic coming in).

Even if you only make an extra $100 a year from an article site, after a few years, it’s certainly paid for the 10 or 20 hours you put into building it. And you’ve got an asset that is worth something, so you could sell it down the road for additional money if you chose.

If you build 5 or 10 sites like this, chances are you’ll hit on one that turns out to be a real winner, bringing in noticeable earnings each month. At that point, you can build up the site a little more, or build related sites in order to mine the niche for all it’s worth.

In the next post of this series, we’ll talk more about choosing a keyword-rich domain name and other SEO considerations.