Choosing a niche market
Depending on the type of content your site focuses on, the amount you earn from each adsense click will differ. Some niche sites can earn you more than $1 a click, while other ads will only earn you a few cents per click. Even if your site only gets about 20 visitors a day, you can earn fairly decent money ($5-$6 per day) if your CTR is very high, say around 30%. However, most bloggers don’t get this type of CTR unless the ads on their site are very well targeted.
What is CTR?
CTR stands for click through ratio and is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was clicked on. CTR will vary a lot depending on the type of topic you choose and the nature of your site. Many publishers say that sites with products as the topic tend to get better CTR because people are in a buying mood when they go to the site and are therefore more likely to click on an ad.
Seasonal differences can also make a big difference to CTR, with many people tending to purchase more before holidays which can lead to considerable increases in CTR.
Another trend is that sites with a high degree of loyalty tend to have lower CTR because people are used to looking at your site and are often looking for specific information.
Improving CTR
1. Position - obviously, if you put the ad in a spot on your page where no one will see it, your CTR will be very low. If you position in a spot with higher visibility it will be seen more and clicked on more.
2. Site design – enticing (subtly) readers to click on your adsense ads by using visuals such as images, shapes, colours etc. can be very useful. Just make sure it isn’t in your face otherwise it could break adsense rules. One thing studies have shown is that ads tend to perform better on a white background with white space around it.
3. Decluttering your blog - some web owners have reported higher CTR on sites or pages where they don’t have any outgoing links other than their adsense ones. But doing this can make it harder to get good SEO because pages are not interlinked.
Darren Rowse, who has written a lot about CTR on his site believes that most bloggers probably fit into the 2-5% range, while others have tried everything but seem to have a problem getting over 1%.
Choosing the right niche site
The type of site you create will depend on whether or not you are making the site because it is something you have a passion for or simply whether you want to make some money. The best combination to have is a topic you have a real passion for which also has high pay per click value on the ads which are served for that particular topic.
How do you choose the right keyword and calculate its value?
Figuring out how much people are willing to pay for keywords is important. There are a variety of tools available on the internet, some for free and some paid services.
1. Spyfu.com
2. Overture.com
3. Googlest.com
4. Keywords.clickhereforit.com
If you are at an advanced stage or just have too much money to spend, you can use a comprehensive paid service like wordtracker.com
If you are looking at building a site just to cash in, then you should definitely use one of these sites to figure out the value of your main keywords.
1. Spyfu.com
A good free PPC analysis tool which estimates what people are currently paying per click for various keywords is SPyFu. The results which are displayed are not exact figures but should give you a good indication of the type of prices advertisers are paying for any given keyword.
Spyfu is basically a scraper of keyword related data and is a powerful program. It can do the following:
When you go to Spyfu’s site, you are greeted with the following screen.
There are three different types of things you can search for within the SpyFu search box: terms, domains, and company names. SpyFu will first check if your search matches a domain, then a term, and finally a company. The free site offers you about 5-10% of what the total SpyFu package encompasses, but it is enough initially if you are just starting out. If you subscribe you get access to a richer interface and a lot more meaningful statistics (see below).
- Search by keyword, Company, Domain, Category, or Industry
- Browse by Category and Industries.
- Search by Domain (i.e. Microsoft.com) and view
- Estimated Daily Advertising Budget
- Total Clicks Per Day
- Average Cost per Click
- Average Click Day
- Average Ad Positon
- Average Ad Competitors
- Average Ad Percentile
- Alexa Rank
- Incoming Links
- Average Load Time
- Top 10 Organic Results
- Top 10 Ads
- Top 20 Organic Competitors
- Top 20 Ad Competitors
- Up to 15 Sub Domains for the parent domain
- Up to 15 Other Domains Owned
- Up to 5 of the Categories the Domain is listed in.
- Search by Term (i.e. Cars) and view
- Cost per Click
- Click per Day
- Cost per Day
- Number of Advertisers
- Number of Organic Search Results
- Top 5 Adword results with Ad
- Top 10 Organic Search Results with description
- Up to 5 Categories the Term is listed in
In the searchbox, type in the major market you are thinking of targeting (e.g. weight loss etc) and hit search. You will get a screen which displays a variety of information as shown below.
