Follow Me in My Newbie AdSense Challenge

First.. Welcome and Good Luck.

1. Yes, there are tons of good threads and google so no need to buy an ebook.
2. I don't use paid for tools, there are some really good free ones though that make life easier.

Only thing I would add or suggest is to seriously consider taking a dual approach to how you wish to earn an income from a website. If you are using Adsense then have something else working with it. The reason I suggest this is because it isn't always easy to go back later and just add it but if you take it into consideration initially then it should help to yield higher profits and multiple revenue streams.

Dude, first let me applaud you for having the balls to come on here and post a thread as to what you're gonna do to make this online thing work for you.

Here is the main obstacle you're going to be faced with first, having a purpose, why are you doing this? Answer that question first, and then you can understand your direction. This will help when you get frustrated.

As a newbie trying to break into this IM thing and make money, here is one important tactic that you need to do. When you list your goals, write them out as if present tense, not at a point in the future.

So you would instead be like, I'm sitting here looking at my computer and I'm logging into my google analytics back office and I'm looking at my stats that reads, 100 unique vistors, shows I made $10 in adsense, etc". Put it in the present tense and make it as descriptive as possible. Describe what else you see, what is happening at the moment when you look outside, etc. Doing this will fire up your subconscious, which is what you want.

Now you have to tell yourself what income goal you want. Is it $500 a month? $1000 a day? What is it? And write goals down just like I describe above, in present tense.

There are so many more elements to this picture, but do this exercise and you will magically see results happen.

Before approaching the keyword and niche research, I'm going to reveal which tools I'm going to use in the process of building and maintaining the website. The reason why I want to do this now is that I'm going to edit this frequently, by adding new or deleting outdated tools. I need this to be on the top of the first page, so here it is:

Market Samurai FREE Trial - I didn't want to list this at first, but I do have to admit that it's an extremely powerful tool. I've given you the link to the 40-day extended trial (it's 14 days usually). After the trial expires, the most important tool - keyword tool and the domain checker will remain free of charge. There are also some powerful features in it, like finding potential backlinks, searching for content you could research, publishing content to your blog directly from MS, different monetization options and SEO competition report.
I had to use this tool because of the webinar, and I have to say that the methods explained there are really helpful and useful. They got me out of the slump I got in and I strongly recommend you watched it.

Traffic Travis FREE - This is perhaps the most important and advanced tool in my arsenal of free ones. This tool will enable me to do keyword research (it uses Google Keywords tool), find exact match domains, keep track of rankings for certain keywords, analyze competition, see backlinks to my website, get suggestions for backlinks, based on my keywords, and suggest on-page SEO optimizations. It's a really great free tool in which there are more than enough types of data for you to work with.

Copyscape Premium - I'm a freelance writer so I have a few hundred credits on Copyscape premium and I'm going to use them to check the content which I will write for the niche site.

Google Analytics - I'm not going to use Clicky or any other tracking service. I'm going to rely on big G's analytics to keep track of the visitors on my website.

SEO Quake - This is a great toolbar for search engine results. It shows PR, backlinks, indexed pages, tweets, Facebook likes, etc. It can give you very essential information about competition. Also, it can tell you about the keyword density in your website and give you diagnosis on meta tags, titles, headings and other on-page SEO factors. Traffic Travis has the same feature, of giving you recommendations about your website and pages, but I like having a few opinions at the same time.

P.S. - Here I will post some great things I've referenced to through my challenge. I'll start a blog once I have an idea of what my niche will be. The first entry in this list isn't a link to my blog, it's about the MS's The Challenge training modules.

-The Challenge Training
-Niche Site Duel by Tyrone Shum

Remember this list will get bigger and bigger with time, so if you have any tools that you are using and think they will be helpful to us newbies, please share! :p

Well all the best NoMoreawords for your journey. One advice i would like to gave is take one thing at a time and move to next only when you have completed first and be motivated All the best.

Having Problems

I was in a real mind block and I couldn't think up of anything. Everything I searched had very high competition and it would have been a hell to rank for. So I began searching the warrior forum for threads on how to find niches and keywords that will be profitable and easy to rank for.

Alas, I didn't find anything that would be of some use. It's not that the guides aren't great, it's just the fact that they use paid tools and subscriptions that stops me from finding my niche. I couldn't find anything apart from what I had already read and it wasn't of any help.

So I began searching the Internet and after 24 hours of banging my head and not knowing what to do, I stumbled upon . I watched it and it is a part of an 8-webinar series.

I downloaded the free trial of Market Samurai (I'll add it to the tool post right away) and began doing exactly what was told in it. I strongly recommend everybody to do this if they are in a slump.

Another thing; I already told you that I have a website about "european cruises". While playing with my tools, trying to figure out some things, I realized one thing. Traffic Travis was telling me that it would be Relatively Easy to rank for the term, while Market Samurai, would tell me that it won't be so. There isn't a single website under PR3 in the top 10 and many of them have a lot of backlinks from different domains. Most of the websites were also listed in the Yahoo Directory (paid) and I think this is an index to how powerful they are. I won't give up on that project as well, but I'm going to focus on building a niche website from scratch now.

I'll be in touch soon, when I find a keyword I can target and rank well for. Cheers!

So I thought I should do what everybody else, what every tutorial and guide out there was telling me: find a niche in which money is already being spent on, for a niche in which people are interested, that is where money will most likely be. So I took that advice and began searching through these:
-Squidoo Top 100
-Amazon Bestsellers

First, I looked at the Amazon Bestsellers page, but I didn't know how to actually use the information there. I learnt the model of thinking in which I should find a niche from there, but I was too afraid to apply it. So I went on to Squidoo Top 100. I looked through the list, all the way from 1 to 100 and wrote down, on a piece of paper, everything that would make a great site; that could be commercialized.

Here is an example: Currently, at #1, there is a lens called "Fashion Trends - Fall and Winter 2012/2013". So I wrote down the keyword winter fashion. The #2 is a "Best Mother-Son Dance Songs". Now, many of you would tell me that this is a great niche idea to open up a website and eventually sell CD's and music tracks, eventually books on mother-son relationship, but I don't see much potential in that. So I skipped it and didn't write anything.

So I scrolled down all the way to the 100 and wrote down every piece of information that I thought would be a great subject for a niche website. At the end of the 100 sites, I had a list of probably 15-17 niches and starting keywords to use in Market Samurai (I'm using the Trial Version). This might be a low number, but the Christmas gifts lenses were just too dense in the top 100, so they left me with less other options.

Then came time for the dirty work. I had to check every and each of those keywords and niche ideas I had written down. I began with the niche of the #6 ranked website and it did have some potential, but I didn't quite feel like doing that particular website. So I went on to the next thing I had written down and it was "blood sugar". I created a new MS project with this keyword and did research. From what I read and learnt over the past few days while having a major struggle with finding a low-competition niche, with a lot of money being spent on it, is that you need to have a keyword with:

• >80 SEOT on daily broad search
• 15 PBR
• <30 000 SEOC

A problem I encountered was with the difference in the CPC values of MS and GKW. More info you could find here. I'll have to believe MS in their ways of calculating CPC and go with it. I dug deeper in here and chose a few other keywords which had relatively good CPC and daily traffic. For now I won't be giving out any more information on keywords. I don't want my site to be easily discovered, it could mess with the results of this study/challenge.

The important thing is that I was able to get through this period and find a niche that will be profitable. CPC is good, there are many Clickbank products I could sale, as well as Amazon products. The competition is low and I think that if I continue learning and implementing what I've learnt, I will be able to get to page 1 of Google. Perhaps the problems came from the things Google told me, or from the way I did my research.

I have no personal opinion on this one, I'm just following what the tutors from The Challenge told in their materials. Many of you will tell that is wrong, but I do find some common sense in it: Broad search will show you your potential traffic (I rarely see people searching for something in brackets) and Exact search will tell you about the competition. What are your opinions and experiences on this, it seems to be an interesting problem.

Also, I'd like to hear from those who have used MS for some time now. Is the CPC thing true and accurate? Is it a good way for people to estimate what they might earn from a website? Or is it just a phony number that gives false belief.

Good thread OP.

Just one worry - you're doing the same as 99% of the other folk here. By that I mean niche sites targeting Keyword Tool keywords and monetised through AdSense.

Wishing you all the best. Keep posting your results. I am book marking this thread.

Things I've done by now:

• Bought a domain name. The exact match domain was taken, so I tweaked it a little, but it still has the main keyword in that particular order in it. It's a .com domain and I registered it at Namecheap for about $9.70 with one of their coupons(GIVINGTHX only available during November) taking the price down by a dollar.
• I set up the free hosting. If you haven't read the introduction post, you should know that I'll be using free hosting, until I see some profit coming out of the website. Now I know that this isn't really good for the website, but it is part of the challenge. I want to invest as little money as I could, as not many newbies would be ready to give sums in the likes of $50-$60 at once.
• I installed WordPress and I'm choosing a theme. Since this is more of a health-related website, I believe that your plain white and black theme wouldn't be very suitable. So I'll be choosing something that has pale green. I don't know why, just a hunch. If you have any good themes or theme ideas, be sure to share them!

Now the real part of the challenge begins. I've found out that it will be easy to rank for the keyword when it comes to on-page SEO. The page 1 sites are obviously not ranking for this keyword, so I believe a good backlinking strategy will get me to the top 3 very fast. But, as I said, the real part of the challenge begins now. Content is King, I've heard this many times and I agree with it.

Now, there are two challenges ahead of me before I begin building links:
-On Site SEO - I will do proper on site SEO, without sounding generic. I will not just write any description or title so I can put my keyword in it. I will create a description and title which have the keyword, but wrap up what my website is about without being out of place. The META Description is extremely important and I will take some time to write it so that people feel confident about my site. Other good SEO practices are changing the permalink structure of WordPress pages and posts, and using tags. While I won't be trying to reach some specific KWD%, I will still try and insert my keyword here and there. Since Google are looking at the occurrence of the KW throughout the whole page, the tags part is a really sneaky way to add 1.
-Content is King - Do lots of research, find interesting topics. If I'm going to aim for Google #1 spot, I will need to give answers to the most popular and common questions people ask about my topic. I will need to write unique, interesting and easy to digest content. I won't exaggerate nor belittle facts. I will say everything as-is and try to gain the readers' trust. Perhaps about 10 articles within the next 5-7 days will get me up and running.

Why do this prior to backlinking? - If I don't have what to link to in my website, when a visitor comes, he will see a mere 2-3 articles and then leave. The idea is not only to build links for the search engines. After all, when a person clicks on the link, he obviously expects to see some quality content that will help him in his matter. This is why I'll first be writing some content, then begin backlinking. For now, I won't be laying out my off page SEO strategy. I'll get to at least 10 articles, then draft out a plan for that.

Contributing is good, setting yourself a target is great.

Not selling, try read the link on my signature to get more idea where should you go about.