Adsense and your crystal balls

Posted by stuart as , , ,

As I’ve been merilly banging away at my adsense sites over the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to apply some criteria to the subjects I am developing sites around:

• I must be interested in the subject
• It must have reasonable search numbers
• It must be able to generate reasonable traffic
• It must have reasonable (but not high) paying keywords
• There mustn’t be too much competition

This is where I try to use some “non-tech” methods to try to discover niches where I think I can make a few bucks from adsense.

The trick is to pick subjects which don’t yet have high traffic, and therefore high competition, but may well pick up dramatically in the future.

We are trying to gain high search engine rankings for the subject before it takes off. A good tool to use for this research is the Google trend tool. For example, the graph of people looking for “porn” in Hungary would look like this. As you can see, the graph is on a slight upward trend, so it might be worth putting a porn site together targeting Hungarians (!)

The holy grail of this kind of niche site development is the site that, once developed and bedded down with the search engines, just takes off. I’m talking about subjects like “Bird Flu” and how it relates to your particular country.

Let’s say I live in Canada. There have been no confirmed cases of bird flu in my country yet, so the search traffic is reasonably low, but imagine what’s going to happen to the search numbers if there are a couple of (god forbid) cases of bird flu confirmed. There will be people looking up how to find what the symptoms are, how to protect themselves and their families etc.

Now imagine that you’d been smart enough six months earlier to set up a site that provided all this information, had had time to climb to a reasonable ranking in the search engines, and could bring you some good traffic.

The added benefit here is that advertisers will understand that people are now searching for bird flu information, and adwords bid prices will go through the roof for bird flu related subjects.
Now my subjuct might seem a little morbid, but the theory can be applied to any subject with the potential to “take off”, some ideas might include:

• Voice over IP
• Solar Power
• Hydrogen powered cars
• What to do in the event of a terrorist attack