Niche Adsense Websites - Observations After 18 Months

The following observations are the result of running a small network of niche sites monetized via Adsense. I built these sites over the course of a few months starting back in January 2010, and they currently account for about 20% of my IM income. While IM is not my full-time job a large proportion of my 9-to-5 deals with custom analytics and landing page optimization, which is why Adsense appealed to me in the first place.

Disclaimer: This is in no way intended to be a "how-to" guide and you will not find detailed instructions on niche selection, SEO or anything else in this post. I will not be revealing specific niches or figures here, and while much of the following may appear common sense I hope it might help others starting out on their own Adsense journey. Specifically it might prevent you from wasting time looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist. In the post-Panda world you'll need to work harder than ever if you want to make consistent money with micro-niche Adsense sites.


Niche and Keyword Selection

Keyword research and selection is the cornerstone of micro-niche promotion. If you get this part right then you can often succeed no matter how badly you fudge everything else. Get it wrong however, and you could face an uphill struggle that ultimately won't be worth your time. In retrospect I have made various mistakes in my keyword research, although I also fluked upon a couple of gems.

I've been guilty of setting my sights too low and as a result have sometimes selected niches that, while easy to rank for, have yielded either too few visits or too few advertisers to make them worthwhile. In retrospect I wish I'd been more confident in the niches that I've attempted to tackle, and in the future will be more ambitious with my niche selection. Ultimately, I'd rather have a crack at a moderately competitive niche that has the potential for a decent pay-off than waste my time getting ranked for keywords with poor ROI.

It's worth noting here that although some niches might appear to have a large number of potential advertisers each might only have a small Adwords budget. In a niche with lots of competing publisher sites this might result in less-than-expected ad coverage.

I've also found that generic micro-niches often outperform model-specific micro-niches due to a relatively higher number of well targeted ads. For example "red widgets" might be a better keyphrase than "acme scarlet widgets" simply because advertisers are less likely to write ad copy for specific product models than umbrella phrases. I believe that relevance of ad copy plays a huge part in determining your CTR (maybe as much as you ad layout), so ensuring you can get well targeted ads is imperative. As an aside I have improved revenue from under-performing model-specific content by replacing Adsense blocks with Amazon product widgets (YMMV).


Don't Disregard Seasonal Niches

First off, seasonal niches can be extremely lucrative. I have a site that makes as much during November, December and January (combined) as any of my niche sites do throughout the whole year. Seasonal niches often have lower competition and so are easier to rank for, and there are enough seasonal niches to ensure that no matter the time of year you could have sites pulling in cash during their peak season.

It's worth noting that sometimes a niche that at first suggests seasonality will turn out to be a perennial earner. I have a site that promotes a specific piece of exercise equipment that I assumed would prove most popular during winter but in practice that site has performed consistently year-round.

One of the problems with developing sites around a seasonal niche is the difficulty in predicting ad coverage and number of advertisers if you're outside of that niches peak season. Generally you want to build your site 6 months before peak season so that your domain can age and you can rank for your keywords. I'm afraid that I still haven't got a solution to this one, although I've got list of keywords I researched last winter that I might start building now, but if you're starting from scratch then you don't have that luxury. I know that the Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends will show broad trends but I don't know of a way to get detailed keyword figures out of season. That might be a weakness on my part - if you know how then please let me know

In summary I think that seasonal niches present a great opportunity if you're comfortable with fluctuations in your income. Personally I intend to exploit seasonal niches further as I move forward.


CTR Optimization

I've used various theme's throughout my journey with Adsense and although I've done extensive A/B testing and tweaking, I've never found a magic bullet that significantly boosts my CTR. At times my layouts have been very "aggressive", but I've always been careful to keep within Adsense TOS. At one point I was obsessed with making my sites look nicer so that I could lower my bounce rate, the logic being that if people stuck around for longer than a few seconds they were more likely to click on one of my ads. This was also partially motivated by fear and paranoia over losing my Adsense account if I was too aggressive in ad placement, something that no doubt arose from reading all the horror stories of banned Adsense accounts that you read from time to time.

After all of my efforts and I can categorically say that overall any improvements to CTR have been marginal, and sometimes changes have even had a detrimental effect. I've recently switched to "CTR Theme", but I'm not sure if I'll stick with it as I was getting a similar CTR using my own custom theme. My conclusion is that there is only so much that you can improve your themes and ad layouts to improve CTR as other factors, like ad relevance, greatly influence CTR. In retrospect I think that I've spent more time than necessary trying to optimize CTR - time that would have been better spent writing new content or researching new niches. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns at work here.

My advice to anybody starting out would be to choose an aggressive (but compliant) theme and then concentrate on content and SEO. Of the themes that are publically available my current favourite is CTR Theme, although others prefer the Clickbump Engine. Either of these would be a great start and will save you headache and heartache further down the line.


Average CPC

When I first started out my average CPC fluctuated wildly for a couple of months, but since then it's been pretty steady with a deviation of only +/-5%. This is across multiple niches, some seasonal, with different sites rising and falling in the SERPs (and therefore a differing ratio of clicks across each niche). I'm not sure what exactly to make of this, as it could be the result of an averaging effect across my portfolio of sites or it could be hand of Google at work. Draw your own conclusions, but I'm in the process of building a couple of sites around keywords that research suggests should yield significantly higher CPCs, so I'll wait and see if it's enough to push my average CPC beyond it's current stable range.


On-Page SEO

I've always been on top of on-page SEO, so I covered off all of the usual criteria (site structure, internal links, H1 tags, alt tags etc) early on, plus most decent themes are quite good in that respect. What I've realised recentlythough, especially since the Panda updates, is that the quality of my content makes an enormous difference to my rankings. When I first started building these sites I wrote all of the content myself, spending a couple of hours on each article (research and writing). As time progressed I got lazier and outsourced writing, dropping my editorial standards somewhat. The interesting thing here is that the pages where I wrote content myself are ranking better than ever, but the lower quality pages have either dropped, or have problems stabilising in the SERPs. It seems that the old addage "content is king" is as true as ever. My plan for the future is to ensure that all content is high quality and I'm going to revisit and rewrite some of my older pages that I'm confident I can bring back into the SERPs.


Off-Page SEO

When it comes to off-page SEO micro-niche sites typically face different challenges than larger brand and authority sites. It's difficult to get authority backlinks as most sites are so niche and commercial in nature that nobody wants to be associated with you. The white hat method for getting backlinks to these sites tend to involve article directory submission and manual social bookmarking, while others choose to go down the black hat route. Personally I've tried several different methods, and I don't think anybody will be suprised when I say that I've had most success from in-content links from diverse IP ranges. That basically means using a blog network of one kind or another. I've had initial success with other methods, but generally my sites start to drop if I rely on social bookmarks and profile links. The simple truth is that in-content links work best for me. That means that I'm going to have to write even more content - some for my sites, but some for backlinks too!

I also want to mention exact match domains (EMDs). While useful for gaining initial rankings a micro-niche EMD can limit your ability to build out a site as a more authority resource. However, of the sites where I admit to less than stellar content those with EMDs have held their rankings best. It seems that, for the time being, EMDs still provide a nice boost. The only problem is finding niches with available EMDs now that the rest of the world has jumped on the micro-niche bandwagon!


Summary

If you've been building niche Adsense sites for a while then I doubt there are any real revelations here, but hopefully this will have been useful to somebody. If I had to put together some "take home" points from my experience they would be:

• perform due diligence on the profitability of a niche before building a site
• don't be afraid to tackle moderately competitive niches with higher potential rewards
• don't shy away from seasonal niches
• don't spend too much time "tweaking" your site design - pick a decent optimized theme and get on with writing content
• only use genuinely high quality content (be brutally honest with yourself)
• as with content creation, the most effective SEO methodology seems to be the one that is most labour intensive
• EMDs still hold value, for the time being at least

Well, that's about it. Who'd have guessed you actually have to work hard at this micro-niche thing to make money. I'm sure there'll still be hoardes of people who will think otherwise and they will have to learn for themselves. Hopefully if you've read this far you'll have found something of interest or use to you. If not, sorry for wasting your time