Earn Online CashEarn Online Cash with a Niche Adsense Blog
One way to earn cash online is with Google Adsense. Yes, everybody and their brother’s sister’s cousin is using it on their website and they’ll probably telling you that they consider themselves lucky to be making $8 and change in a month. Why is it that they’re earnings are so low? Well, there are some reasons for that and they should become obvious to you as we work through this article.
What we want to work on are simple sites that will earn an average of $10 a day using Adsense. I know this isn’t a huge amount of money, only about $300 a month. However, it’s relatively easy to create such a blog so you can setup at least 3 sites per month without too much trouble. Soon it begins to add up to some really decent earnings. I’m also going to concentrate primarily on using free tools to do this. While there are paid tools like SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, Bookmarking Demon and many others that can help automate this process I’m going to concentrate on the cheapest route to earning cash online here.
Keyword Research
The first thing is to decide on the right niche to target. You want to avoid high competition keywords where some real Adsense and SEO pros are dominating search results. You’re unlikely to get to page 1 or even page 5 in Google search results with these keywords unless you have a lot of time to spend. You also want to avoid keywords that don’t pay well. There are many keywords that only pay a penny or two a click. What we want are keywords where we can get an average of $1 a click.
How can you tell which ones to select? Easy, go to Google’s Adwords keyword tool and enter keywords that you want to research. Keep researching until you have a short list of promising keywords. Make sure that you display the price per click and divide that number by 4 or 5 to determine the most likely price per click you’ll get on your site. For example, if the Estimated Avg. CPC in the Adwords tool shows $4.80 then your average earnings per click will be about $1.06. You will also want to find keywords that get reasonable traffic. While lower traffic niches can be profitable, they can also be frustrating. I’d recommend looking for between 2000 and 20000 searches a month to start with to get the best beginner results.
Now, go to Google and search for the keywords using the SEOQuake browser plugin. Look at the top 10 ranking sites and see what their Google PageRank, Google pages indexed and Yahoo backlinks they have. If these numbers are high and the page shown in results is an exact keyword match, then move on to your next keyword. If there is no keyword match or if they have few links you may have a winner. For borderline cases, this will require further analysis that’s beyond the scope of our discussion here. This article, Targeted Keyword Research, describes the process in a little more depth.
Oh, an remember we’re looking for buying keywords, not informational keywords. I discussed this in this previous article: Buying Keywords. Fortunately, in most cases, better paying keywords are already going to be buying keywords.
Build Your Niche Blog
UPDATE 4/24/2010
I strongly recommend that you purchase your own domain and hosting rather than trying to use Blogger. Google has changed the rules and they’re deleting Blogger blogs left and right, even those with legitimate content and that have been in place for several years.
We’re going to go cheap here and not buy a domain and put WordPress on it. Instead, we’re going to use a plain old ugly Blogger blog. There are some potential drawbacks and pluses associated with using them and if you want to review the pros and cons, check out this article I wrote a while ago on the subject: Niche Blog Hosting: WordPress vs. Blogger.
You’ll want to select a name that matches your primary keyword. It is likely that your primary keyword will already be taken. If this is case, just add a filler word to the name such as ‘mykeyword’ or ‘thekeyword’ or ‘keywordinfo’. The important thing is to get our keyword in the URL.
We’ll want to use the simple Minima template, we don’t want a fancy blog, we want just another ugly Blogger blog. We will also want to set it up to show only one post per page since this helps Google’s search and Adsense ‘bots to get the exact keywords for your article and not get confused. The blog title and description should be for the primary keyword and secondary long tail keywords that you want to target with only filler words between them. You can add some navigation widgets to the sidebar if you want but don’t overdo this. I also recommend that you add in a Statcounter and/or Google Analytics counter to your footer. This will help you track the performance of your keywords.
Creating Niche Blog Content
Now we’re ready to create some content for our blog. I generally prefer to create content offline in an editor like Microsoft Live Writer, Microsoft Word or even Windows Notepad. There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. I just like doing it this way so that I have a local backup copy of my articles. Start off with writing about 10 articles. The title will use your primary keyword, for example “Earn Online Cash” with matching long tails like “Earn Online Cash with Adsense”. Begin and end your article with a sentence that uses your primary keyword and include it several times throughout the article but don’t overdo it. If you need some more tips on writing, let me know and I’ll point you to some other articles I’ve written on this topic.
You will also want to create a ‘policies’ post since this is required for Adsense. You can combine this with a simple ‘about me’. This will be the first post you add to your new blog. Remember that it should follow the same naming conventions as other posts for example: “Earn Online Cash: Policies”. Add a link to this post in your sidebar so that it will always be just one click away from any other page on your blog.
Now add 3 of your content posts to the blog. You’ll add a new post about once a week until all of your original posts are up. After that, you’ll only need to post infrequently, if at all. New posts can help bring more keywords into the blog but, as long as you’re getting good search engine traffic, updating can be at your leisure.
Promote Your Niche Blog
Promoting your blog is primarily getting it indexed and getting links to it.
You might want to start with the techniques I describe in this article: Quick Indexing. While you can’t add all those ping sites to Blogger like you can WordPress you can use some of the pinging sites to ping others. I also suggest that you submit your site to RSS aggregation sites. JR at “Get Internet Marketing Strategies” has a good list of them here: RSS/Blog Submission Sites. You don’t have to submit to all of them and some won’t accept Blogger blogs but you can find enough to get your rolling. Remember the primary idea is to use these resources for indexing of new content.
Now, we’ll want to build links to our blog. There are a number of different strategies here and people generally settle on ones that work well for them. I’ll give you a few basic methods here and you can work on it from there.
One good way to get some basic links is to use social bookmarking. JR has some good lists of sites in these two articles: Do-Follow Social Sites and High PR Do-Follow Social Sites. There are other list around that you can use. In general, you want to look for social sites that are do-follow and will allow Blogger blogs.
Another way to build links to your site is to have promotional sites of your own. You can use Squidoo, Synthasite, Blinkweb and other free sites to build single page sites to promote your site. You should also seek out other blogs and forums in your niche and related niches and leave comments there with a link to your site without being spammy. I cover this in more in depth in this article: Driving Traffic to Your Site.
With reasonable link building promotional work you should begin to see search traffic for your keywords within a relatively short period of time. What you’re looking for is for your blog to be on page one of Google for your select keyword. If it’s not, then the niche may be more competitive than you realized and you’ll have to put more promotional effort into it. If you are in the #1 position and you aren’t getting traffic then the problem may be that the keyword you select doesn’t produce enough traffic. In this case, you might try targeting different keywords or retire the blog to a supporting, promotional, role.
Add Adsense to Your Niche Blog
OK, now that you’re getting traffic to your niche blog and it’s steady traffic, it’s time to add Adsense. My recommendation is to add a single large rectangle block at the top and, optionally, a wide skyscraper in the sidebar. This should result in a good click through rate as long as you’ve selected a good buying keyword. Since you’re already getting search traffic to your site it will be easy for the Adsense ‘bot to determine what your blog is about and begin serving appropriate ads.
At this point, you should begin to see clicks and revenue from your blog. It will take a few weeks for the pricing of your site to settle down so expect some wild gyrations in income at first. Eventually, it will settle down.
If your earnings stay low this may indicate a problem with your keyword selection. Try editing your articles to better emphasize the higher paying keywords and de-emphasizing lower paying ones.
If your CTR is low, typically under 3%, this may indicate that you haven’t selected a good buying keyword or your traffic is from a niche that’s somewhat jaded or resistant when it comes to Adsense ads. If this is the case, you may want to try moving toward better keywords with new posts, move the blog to a supporting role or just live with the lower click through rate. Remember that a low CTR won’t hurt you but a low CTR with clicks that don’t convert might hurt you.
Earn Cash with Your Niche Blog
Remember the key to this method is not to get bogged down and obsess over one blog but to keep moving. The more blogs you create and the more promotion (aka links) that you do the better your chance will be at earning cash online.
Whew! This was a long article. Way too long. I should have padded it out and made it into an eBook and sold it for $47 or made some money some other way like having you sign up for a membership site or an email list, right? Well, I’m just trying to do the same thing that people who helped me, like Griz at How to Make Money Online for Beginners, did, offer good, solid, information for free with no strings attached. I hope you can use this information to earn cash online and feel free to ask any questions if you have them.
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58 Comments »
Damn, Frank. I’m sure this is more than most “pro bloggers” give you with a PAID MONTHLY membership for their training materials. I’m starting on a new project with this today. I’ll let you know how it goes.
T
Hi T,
This post started out as an eBook idea that I started working on last month but I decided the Internet already had enough eBooks on making money with Adsense. So I cut a little bit of extra explanation by linking to a few other posts and leaving some details for later.
Let me know how your new project goes.
Hello frank,
Yeah this is absolutely amazing content on your blog here!!! I paid 78 dollars for a “free” trial and then I looked up a yahoo search and found your blog, so I click and read, and read, and read… I couldn’t stop reading… You are giving away the exact information that they are selling!!!! LOL, was I ever dumb…. I have my own blog set up and am a major beginner at this. I am 22 years old, but very smart and going to college for computer science right now, but I do not have money to just throw away, you know what I mean???? ha. Great blog, and keep up the great work…. please if you have a mailing list or something let me know… I know that this does work, it is just a matter of getting the traffic and the money for getting that traffic and keeping your content wonderful… content is no prob for me. CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT is what it truly is all about…
Thanks.
Wouldn’t my Brother’s Sister be my Sister and ergo wouldn’t my Brother’s Sister’s Cousin be my Cousin?
Anyway, you said that you would give an example with respect to free tools; however, do you see any advantages of using Keyword Elite over Google’s Adsense Tool now that Google gives search volume?
Hi Howard,
The cousin thing is actually a quote from the thief in Conan the Destroyer.
Keyword Elite will give you more detailed information which can be critical for moderate to high competitive niches. I find for the kind of niches I’m talking about here that the free tools are sufficient for the job. I also find the way that they’re split testing purchases of the ‘Elites’ right now between the regular price and subscription rather annoying so I wouldn’t recommend purchasing right now for that reason although it would be worth having later on if you want to move into more competitive areas.
My father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate always has coffee with his Adsense.
I liked how the article presented a good concise summary of the process. You probably should roll it into an eBook; why not? If you want to give more specific detail (as always, where the devil plays) I think you’d do a great job of it. You could always put it at a lower price and do well with it.
Thanks,
I just borrow mostly from Griz with a little bit of Vic and Court and put my own spin on it.
Damn Frank, nice job!
You really explained everything well on how to find and earn online cash with Adsense on niche blogs. I am so glad I subscribe to your feeds. Light bulbs sure have been going off lately!
I have been working hard at building niche sites both on wordpress and on Blogger and other Free platforms. I get a three day weekend this weekend and I will be busting ass to get as many of these sites up as possible. Hopefully I can find a few prosperous keywords that stick and finally make some great Adsense money.
Shoot I haven’t even had hardly any time to hang out at the academy lately.
Well back to building.
Thanks for posting and being such an inspiration.
Hi Denise,
That darned Akismet! It buried your comment in among a deluge of auto-spam from a disreputable site.
Just remember that you have to build links to those new sites to get traffic. And don’t forget about them either. I had one site that was doing quite well that I forgot to go back and add Adsense to it for several months!
Wow Frank – super post – I have a site which I was thinking about putting a $7 ebook on – but hadn’t got around to doing so – i had the blog up which was supposed to be using just for commenting but forgot to take it down – so now I am fixing the blog to optimise the Adsense clr! I find that I am more comfortable with Adsense – it feels less like selling – but maybe I am being a wimp about doing a sales page LOL
Your last line under creating content – has something missing – do you ever up date them? Also what sort of length post do you go for ?
Hi Lis,
I’m not sure what happened there. I probably accidentally deleted something when I was cutting and pasting. Oh well, thanks for letting me know and I’ve fixed it.
Once you have all of the initial posts up, updating the blog with new posts is really a matter of what you’re seeing in terms of search engine rankings and the search terms visitors are using to find your blog. If your rankings are slipping it’s a good idea to post something new and go through the usual pattern of getting links that works for you. If you see traffic arriving on buying keywords you can take advantage of, create a post for them, build links, etc.. Griz has mentioned this a number of times on his blog and I’ve found it to work really well in practice.
Another good time to add a post is if you see a trend in your particular niche. This can bring in a burst of buying traffic if you time it right.
For length, I try to go for at least 500 words, usually more.
[...] I can point you over to Frank Carr’s blog and check out his post on how to earn online cash with a niche blog. His method is not original, in fact its similar to how Grizz makes money with Adsense – but it [...]
Frank
I’ve been using Micro Niche Finder for the last couple of weeks. I’m sure you have heard of its SOC but I’m now doubting its accuracy. There are a couple of “zero or low competition” long-tail keywords I picked but apparently most of them doesn’t rank well on SERP.
What’s your opinion of MNF, Frank?
Yan
Hi Yan,
I haven’t used MNF. I know some people like it and some don’t.
It’s always good to compare results from tool to tool and with the Google Adwords tool. You really never know how well a particular keyword is going to perform until you get on page #1, if not position #1, in Google. The good thing is that even if you pick a bad keyword, you’ll often be able to move sideways into related, better, keywords easily once you’re ranking well for the not-so-good one.
Damn good post! You couldn’t have said it any better unless you did make it into an ebook. The best part is that the method is proven and will work if the steps are done correctly and taken seriously. Great job!
Thanks Trent,
I owe a lot to Griz. Although I always don’t stay right on the trail he laid out it does provide the basics for earning cash online.
Great post, but doesent google get suspicious if you start adding backlinks to a new site too quickly.
Hi Henry,
In the larger scheme of things we’re not talking about a huge number of links, maybe a few hundred spread out over a month or so with a steady number thereafter. It’s just good site promotion. This is different from a blackhatter who uses automated tools to generate 100,000 or even 1,000,000 links overnight, which is real link spamming.
Thanks Frank appreciate the response.
Thanks for the link luv Frank. Love the info too, I was just getting ready to slap up some blogs for Adsense and this guide taught me some new things, thank you!
“we want just another ugly Blogger blog.”
Hey… I represent that! er… resent I mean
[...] Frank Carr with some very focused info like online cash from a niche blog [...]
Hi Frank,
Thanks for the article. I’ve been at this since August and still find the keyword to be sort of an amorphous concept. I’m starting to get a feel for it now, I think.
Two questions: (1)Should you build backlinks to the homepage or to specific posts? and (2)What the heck do you mean by a policies page? I poked around on the adsense site but couldn’t find any mention of it. Sounds important though.
Thanks in advance
Glenn
Hi Glenn,
On your questions…
1. Yes, you should build links to posts and to the home page. It is sometimes more difficult to get links to internal pages but it is worth doing.
2. Adsense requires that you have a privacy policy that essentially states your policies on data collection, tracking cookies and so forth. You can click on my policies link in the menu below to see an example.
Hi Frank….I took a look at SEO Quake. It says that that it was last updated on March 2008. Do you know if it still is compatible and working well with IE?
Hi PotatoChef,
I use it with Firefox, not IE, so I don’t know how well it works there. It was just updated over the weekend for Firefox though. Maybe they just put the wrong date on the IE version.
Thanks – good article and glad you didn’t go down the eBook route. Work checking out wickedfire.com for thoughts on eBooks!! Interesting and unusual philosophy and bang on the money.
Thanks again!
This is the hands down the best article (even among paid courses and ebooks) on adsense niche blogs! Thank you for sharing your insights. I am really impressed.
Frank,
This article is amazing! I just finished the 30 day challenge(sure you’ve heard of it) and I have my first niche site up. This article gave me some awesome ideas to improve it though. Thanks so much for giving out this excellent information for free. If you get a chance check out my niche site about fishing tackle equipment.
mreed
Hi, and thanks a lot for free but quality info!
Just wanted to ask about writing articles..
I’ve read in Vic’s blog that one should write crap articles so that visitors will want to leave the blog(and sometimes they might click on adsense to do that)
Do you agree with this? or should I research about my niche and upload quality content?
Hi bakjewel,
I guess it depends on what you would call ‘quality content’.
I kind of like the term ‘Fast Food Content‘. My philosophy is to provide a ‘Happy Meal’ but not a ’soup to nuts’ multi-course meal. I probably need to update some of my content creation posts from OpTempo over here since they were written over a year ago.
Seeing a banner with an image of cash on a site with the word “cash” as part of it’s domain name bothers me.
Hi Jim,
It’s called ‘branding’.
I debated on going plain but I opted for cheesy instead. At least I decided against the cash background in the main body.
If it works for you, I guess that’s all that matters.
I’ve read EVERYTHING from Griz but you answered some of my stupid/basic beginner questions. Thank you so much for making it simple and summing it up in one post. Very well written!
Hi,
Your site is a big help and I am doing some rechearch to find my best keywords. I am in that SEOQuake part and it makes me think that how high is high? First ones doesn’t have my exact keyword but they rank about 5 in Google pagerank and most of them have under 1000 backlinks. Couple ones have more but they are Wikipedia and some magazine. Is this profitable topic?
Thanks for the great site.
Hi Elena,
The first thing to determine is if the search term you’re considering is a buying keyword. Often, if Wikipedia ranks high, this indicates a more informational than buying search. For example, compare a search on ‘history of credit cards’ to ‘low interest credit card’, noticing the difference in the sites returned. Basically is it something that someone would search for if they wanted to buy it?
Ideally, you want to be in the #1 spot on Google if at all possible. If you can’t accomplish that then somewhere on the first page. Your visitors will drop dramatically when you go to page 2 in results.
How profitable a keyword is depends on several factors such as the number of searchers, how targeted the visitor is, their willingness to click ads and how much you’re paid per click. This is kind of a guessing game at first but eventually you’ll be able to accurately figure out how profitable a particular niche will be, well, most of the time anyway.
Hi Frank,
Thank you for the information about buying words (I went to your other post also) I have heard this before but I now realize that most of the keywords I have been targeting are more words that people are using to search for information. Are the non-buying words good for ebooks, etc.? Or is it better to just stay away for information seekers and stick with buyers?
Thanks for the great info.
Hi Andy,
Sorry I missed your question at first.
I’ve found eBooks to be a bit of a different animal than Adsense. Certainly buying keywords still apply but info searchers might buy too if the price is right. You’ve got to get it into the impulse buy area for the niche, kind of like a magazine in the checkout line at the grocery store. I’ll probably do a post on this at some point.
Great information! I have started 4 new niche blogs and am in the process of making good content for them.I guess 20 articles (submit 10 to article directories and 10 on the blog) should be enough and then just see how it goes.I read in one of Griz´s posts that the less he posts the more he earns with adsense.So, if you put up niche blogs in many different areas with good content, place adsense on the blogs and then just leave them “floating” on the internet, you should make passive income?
Hi Tom,
Yes. However, you do need to continue to build links to the sites so it isn’t entirely passive. Without links your traffic may decline over time depending on the competition in the niche you selected. For example, I have sites that I haven’t done any serious update to in over a year but I do link building promotion to them every 6-12 weeks.
What Griz was saying was mainly applying to his original Blogger blog because he gets a lot of social reader traffic as well as search traffic. When his search traffic increases the more money he’ll make and Adsense will feed his site better, higher paying, ads. I’d guess that his niche sites are almost entirely search traffic and virtually no social traffic.
Read many, many articles, blogs, ezines, forum threads and Twitter comments.
The logic, flow of ideas, access to tools, and clear recommendations makes this the best I’ve read anywhere.
A colleague told me about Griz, and then I found this article.
Thanks!
I was thinking of submitting a few articles to ezinearticles.com once in a while and build links that way.Is that a good idea?
I have adsense on my blogs (self hosted Wordpress) and show adsense ads to people who come from search engines only.This was a tip I got from Griz as well, and I must say that I see results all ready because the pay I get per click is much higher now than it was before when I showed ads to everyone.My main blog has 478 posts at the moment (the result of 3 years of blogging) and now I intend to just leave it for a while to see how it goes.
Hi Tom,
A lot of people use article marketing to promote their sites. I haven’t used it so much for Adsense sites since I’ve preferred to use other promotional methods as described in the article. However, I’m using it for product sales sites. I’d recommend distributing to multiple article sites and not just one to get the maximum distribution. Also, if it fits your budget, using an outsourcing service for article marketing can improve your coverage.
As for showing Adsense to just search visitors, this can be effective where you’re getting a lot of social visitors as well as search visitors.
well your saying is correct that make a niche targetting blog and get benefitted through it but it is now becoming more difficult to carry on as google is not ranking websites well enough,
Hi I get 3000 unique vistors a month and rising. I need some ads. I get 28 cents some days none the others. Can you help me out, Is that just not enough visitors?
Hi Matthew
Same problem here, I think AdSense payouts are just not enough for our industry. The link to our site is in the data field above. We are working on other ways to monetize besides AdSense.
Thanks for this very insightful article.
The site that we just built (link in my screen name) is actually returning pretty high payouts.
building adsense with a niche one is important thing to do. without a niche one you can stay for a long term to get more income from google adsense…
Hi, made a site which is only a month old and it has about 500 views this month but no clicks. Can you help me out? The site is in my sig.
This is really great info on using Google Adsense with niche blogs. I’ve recently started trying it out and I AM lucky to be making $8 and change, but it seems to be picking up for me. I’m actually doing well with the legitimate surveys stuff. People are really pretty sick of being scammed, so I’m glad we’re all trying to point people in the right direction of making legitimate money online.
Its really a good advice for newbies who want to make money online by adsense. I learn lot by your post. Thank you
Hi Frank. Great site! I found you on Griz’s site. Your site is awesome! Quick question, my husband has some websites & is doing okay – he has 3 and is making $480/mo, and I wanted to get started and was thinking about doing a blog. Would you suggest a blog over a website or vice versa?
Thanks for all you do! When I have enough credibility behind me I want to give back like you!
Charity
Great Article Frank..yeah you should produce an ebook and sell it for $147!
This post really show your generousity. I enjoy reading it Frank. More of this quality soon ok.
Thanks
Shah
Thanks for your fantastic post. I found you through the Griz.
Can you please clarify the update about having to have a domain before I can use adsense (”Google now requires that you have your own domain that has been indexed at least 90 days old to be approved for a new Adsense account.”) I don’t have my own domain– only blogger blogs. I signed up for Adsense (through the Monetize link) and I did get signed up. Is there something more I have to do? I did earn a whopping $0.27 a couple of weeks ago (which was a great morale booster) but zilch since then.
Hi Tally,
If you signed up and are able to log in to the Adsense dashboard you’re OK. It does seem that Google is placing some extra scrutiny on some new Adsense applications but others, like yours apparently, seem to cruise right through.
Hello, Mr. Carr.
I really love your posts and am trying to learn and benefit from them.
I am trying to start my online cash making journey with adsense and am doing what you wrote in this article step by step.
I have a question regarding buying a domain. In your article, you wrote Google now requires that I have my own domain that has been indexed at least 90 days to be approved for a new Adsense account.
I got my adsense account approved in around late Feb this year.
I created my blog at “blogger”. URL of my site is “www.internetkiosksoftwareNCR.blogspot.com”.
When I click on “view blog”, it leads me to “hugedomains.com” and I have no idea what this is.
Should I just ignore it and start posting and adjust settings or as you mentioned in your article, do I need to purchase a domain?
Please help me on this.
Thank you very much.
I have been looking for “succinct” to the point information on how to build a niche blog for weeks. Thanks! I have found what I was looking for.