Mikael Rieck

So now we have learned how to find good keywords and we have learned how to pick a good domain so the next thing I will show you is where to setup a hosting account that is cheap but will suit our purpose perfectly.

There are hundreds if not thousands of webhosts available and you will find that there are a handful of them that are reliable and trustworthy while there are many more that aren’t.

The host I have chosen to work with is the one called Hostgator where you are able to host unlimited domains for as little as $10 per month. This might be an expense the first month or two but after that we should see and nice profit from our sites.

In order for you to be able to have multiple domains you need to choose the Baby Croc solution. I won’t go into details about how to sign up for this because the help files at Hostgator are really good.

So now you have a good set of keywords, a great domain name and hosting to build a niche website on. This covers the basics and we’re now going to create a site using a free website template. But before I’ll show you have to do this please go sign up for an Adsense account if you haven’t already done so:

Sign up for Google Adsense

In my hunt for MFA (Made for Adsense) links showing up in the Adsense ads showing on my sites I came across Britt’s Blog where she talked about a cool tool called Adsense Sandbox. The tool will help you determine what Adsense ads will be shown on your site and that can help you find those MFA sites only earning you $0.01 per click.

The way to spot a MFA site is simply by visiting every single URL (enter them manually into your browser – DO NOT click your own ads).

If the site looks like a MFA site, then simply go to you Google Adsense Account, click the menu “Adsense Setup” and then click “Competitive Ad Filter”. Then enter the URLs in the text box and click “save”. That will remove those URLs from the Adsense ads showing on your site.

I hope you have read my post about finding a good keyword for your niche Adsense website as this article will begin where the other one left off. I trust that you have followed my advice and have found a few good keywords with good R/S ratios and with a fair amount of searches.

As I mentioned earlier I hated doing things that could be automated and I have therefore bought the keyword tool called KeywordElite made by Brad Callen. I won’t go into details about the tool in this series of articles as this is meant for all of you that are just starting out and don’t want to invest any money upfront.

In the initial analysis we found that the keyword HORSE wasn’t a good keyword as competition was rather high and it would take to much initial effort to start ranking highly for that keyword. I’ve therefore investigated the niche a little further using KeywordElite and I found a niche that looks interesting and I believe that we might be able to obtain a fair ranking rather quickly and thereby start making some initial Adsense income.

The niche is Horse Trailers and what I found was a few good keywords that I’ll start to build the niche site around. Here are some stats for you:

 
The stats above are found using the “allintitle” search feature in Google. What you’ll see is that we have absolutely amazing R/S numbers as well as KEI numbers. Besides that you will see that the amount of searches per month is more than 58,000 from those four keywords alone. If we’re able to obtain a #1 ranking in Google for those keywords we’ll have enough traffic to really make money off the site.

In the column showing you the Adwords CPC (a feature available in KeywordElite) you can see that the amount advertisers pay per click is rather limited. This means that we can’t expect to make much per Adsense click but the numbers can make up for that plus we’ll look into other options than Adsense to make money off the site once we see the traffic coming in.

Now the next thing we’ll need to do is find a domain name (preferably a dot com) for our site and the best thing will be if we can manage to find a site with our main keyword (horse trailer) in it as well as a name that will be easy to remember for our visitors.

You might be thinking: “does it really matter whether our visitors can remember our URL when we’re planning to attract traffic through search engines?). Yes that will be important and for more reasons than one:

1. If the site really starts to take off we might want to make it into a larger scale business and not “just” a niche site making money off Adsense. You will be glad that you took the time to prepare if that happens.

2. If you search for “horse trailer” in Google and number 1 ranking site has an URL called www.1234horseXYZ.com while number 2 ranking site is called www.horsetrailer.com, which one would you click first? Statistics show that people will click the URL that they believe is the most professional site and therefore you’ll need to find a professional looking domain name.

3. Repeat visitors can make up for much more than the initial first time visitors and why settle for 58,000 visitors if you could have 100,000 or 150,000 instead?

To find a suitable domain we have several options and there are a lot of websites that will help us find interesting domain names. The sites I always use are these:

DomainTools

If you have a list of keywords you can enter them in DomainTools search facility and it will instantly tell you whether the domain is available or not. The list of keywords will have to be with hyphens or without spaces. You could try testing: Horsetrailer, Horse-trailer, Usedhorsetrailer, Used-horse-trailer etc.

The tool will help you search .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us domains for availability. I always recommend sticking with .com or .net domains as they seem more serious.

DomainsBot

If you don’t have a list of keywords or you are out of ideas and need help then DomainsBot will give you some ideas for other domain names. I rarely end up using the suggestions it provides but I always get inspired and usually come up with one on my own. The tool can really be a great help and it’s really fast.

What I normally do is to test the most obvious domains and in this case it would be horsetrailer.com and horsetrailers.com. Both are already taken but that is normally always the case.

Second thing I do depends a little on the niche I am working with but I usually test domains with the following words in either the beginning or the end of the URL:

- pro
- world
- land
- universe
- elite
- instant
- cheap
- review

In this case I found that the domain www.HorseTrailerUniverse.com was free and I went and bought it. If you visit the site you will see that I have already started putting up the site but that it is still a work in progress. The site has not been indexed yet and the first external link to the site is the one I just mentioned.

Where to shop for domains

I always by my domains at www.namecheap.com and they are about $8 per domain per year. That is dirt cheap and we’ll easily make up for those costs with our Adsense income.

Try searching the net for coupons for namecheap domains. The normal prize is $8.88 but you will always be able to find a coupon that will give you a domain for less than $8.

You don’t have to use namecheap and there are lots and lots of places to purchase domains but I just find it to be the best that I have dealt with.

In the next article I’ll show you where you can find good cheap hosting and how to setup the domain to that hosting account.

Over at NetBusinessBlog, the author Dee Barizo has setup a post about a 3-step business building method. It seems that not all readers agree with the process and I have to agree that I would flip the process around which is actually what I’m going to show you in a step-by-step way in the new guide that I have just posted the first step in. For more information on how to setup a niche website please visit the post.

Let me know what you think. Is Dee right in the 3-step approach or are things turned upside down?

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.