Adsense Project – Picking the Niche
Posted on | December 20, 2009 | No Comments
I just finished reading the post I authored on selecting the domain for our site when it occurred to me that I totally skipped an important step in our process, picking the niche we’re going to target!
Niche selection is a tricky thing – a lot of people don’t talk about it per se (or if they do, they don’t discuss it as much as monetization strategies or link building). This is a shame because in my limited experience, I think this is where successful Internet marketers really have it over their competitors. This might also explain why this gets so little attention in various blogs etc.
When I went about picking my niche, I wanted to focus on a few elements that I thought were important:
- Sufficient demand/traffic potential – At a dollar a click, I would need 500 clicks a month to meet my goal. At a conversion rate of 1%, you would need 50,000 visitors per month to meet that goal. I’m hoping for higher conversion and cpc rates, but still need to get some decent traffic to have any shot of hitting my numbers.
- High CPC rates – If you’re getting a buck or less whenever someone clicks on your ad, it’s doubtful you’ll get enough traction to make enough money to justify the opportunity cost of this kind of project. For my niche, I ended up choosing a niche where AdWords bids are between $9 and $20. Still not sure how AdWords rates track to AdSense revenues, but it seems like a good target point.
- Low Competition – In a case like this, the goal is get rankings and generate traffic as soon as possible as I can after launch. This makes it critical that whichever niche I select, I need to feel good about pushing the competition out of the way
- Familiarity – Seeing as how I will be bootstrapping a lot of this project to start, I will probably be writing my own content. I need a topic I am familiar and comfortable with to make sure I can pump out content of sufficient quality as soon as possible.
- Scalability – Don’t forget, our ultimate goal here is to build not just a site, but a process – we want something we can win on once and then duplicate dozens of times across a range of niches.
Keeping all these criteria in mind, I decided to go with a niche/theme focusing on regionalized mortgage searches. I think this will give me the demand and CPC values I’m looking for, plus, by focusing on regional queries, I can avoid a lot of the competition that exists at the national level. Even better, if we can get this to work, it is something that can be easily reproduced simply by targeting more niches.
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