Finding Profitable Keywords without Paying for Software Tools

I’m sure you have come across sites selling software packages that will help you find profitable keywords to use in your Adsense or Adwords campaigns.  You’ll even find sites that have bought the software for themselves and have started making money by selling keyword lists generated by the software.  Both methods can be great and will definitely save you a lot of time in the MOST ESSENTIAL part of creating Adsense websites or finding Adwords keywords to use in your campaigns.

I will focus on finding profitable keywords to use when generating profitable niche websites making money by using Google Adsense. Be aware that this guide will guide you through every step in the process without the use of software tools that you will have to pay for. You can find profitable keywords by using the free online tools that are available (if you are on a tight budget). It will however require a lot of time and effort without the paid tools.

When I have guided you through this step by step process I’ll show you how to setup a website that starts generating Adsense income in a reasonable time and how you’ll be able to grow that income. But first things first and finding the right keywords are the single most important step in the process.

Free Wordtracker Keyword Tool
You will need to start out by putting together a list of keywords that you want to investigate. You can start out by writing down a list of interest that you have like: Gardening, Football, Cooking, Cars, Fashion etc. or you can visit a News site like CNN.com or NYtimes.com and look for interesting relevant topics.

Next you go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and start doing your keyword research. In this example we’ll use the main topic “Horse”.

The numbers you see down the left hand side represents the number of searches for the keyword in the previous month. Typically you can’t really count on Wordtrackers’s numbers and from my experience you will need to multiply these numbers by a factor between 2 and 4.

The numbers in the Search column we’ll call “Searches”. So the keyword “Horse” was searched 17,571 times last month.

Next, we’ll need to check out the competition as you will find that there are many highly searched keywords that have fierce competition and we’ll have a hard time trying to make money using Adsense to start with if we target those keywords. What we are searching for are keywords that have a fair amount of searches and a low competition so we’ll have a change at obtaining a good rank and thereby get our amount of the visitors to our site.

We’ll start by going to Google and search for “Horse”.

As you can see there are 138 million websites listed for the search term “Horse”. Now that sure is a lot of competition. Now there is a way to see what websites are actually targeting this keyword and which sites only mentions it somewhere in their text.

What we’ll do is to see what websites have the keyword in the Title of their webpage as webmasters promoting products or services within a specific topic will often have the keyword somewhere in the title tag of the page. What we’ll do is enter the special search command in Google “allintitle:Horse”.

As you can see the numbers are now reduced a lot and you’ll find that there are actually only 6,790,000 pages competing for that phrase. Now that seems like a more reasonable amount to compete with but it is still a litte to high, but we’ll use it as an example.

Now let us call this number for “Results”. With these two numbers we’re now able to calculate the factor called R/S ratio which in plain English is a measure of the demand for a product (or the keyword). If we take our example the ratio would be 6,790,000 (Results) divided by 17,571 (Searches) or

6,790,000/17,571= 386.43

In my experience a ratio of 386 isn’t good and we’ll be better off finding another keyword to target. The lower the number the more likely it’ll be for you to be able to generate a profit from it. At the same time you will have to find a keyword with enough monthly searches to drive some decent traffic to your site.

Now go through all the keywords you have on your list to see if anyone of those will do the trick. I know that you might end up saying that it is really hard work and you’re absolutely right.    That is exactly why people use software solutions to do the job for them.

Now I’ve used a piece of software called KeywordElite to find a keyword that would be worth targeting. Now you might find it strange that I’ll tell you what the specific keyword is but one of the things that I have always hated was for internet marketers to tell me what to do but never show a true live example using a “good keyword”.

The reason that they normally don’t tell you is obvious because there will be people that’ll pick up the idea (keyword) and go for it. In return that will only make it harder for the marketer to prove his point but I’m willing to take that risk. 

Now the keyword that we’ll be targeting will be given to you in the next session where I will show you how to find a suitable domain name for our niche site. A good domain name (preferably with your keyword in it) can be extremely difficult to find. Good dot com domains are almost all taken and we might settle for a “dot net” or a “dot info” domain. Both will do fine for this little venture though.

Until the next article I encourage you to try to find a few good keywords with low R/S ratios so you will be able to grab a good domain name once the next article is posted.