I’ve been working on creating a series of videos to help people learn about how to make money online by building niche sites. There are several free tools available and more than a number of paid tools for doing keyword research. One of the things that I’ve found is a bit of a barrier when doing free keyword research is trying to organize everything so you can get a clear picture of what your earning potential is for a keyword niche (when focusing on Adsense and traffic).
So, to help you out, I’ve put together a Google Document that is nothing more than a spreadsheet where you can fill in the information you get from your keyword research using the Google Keyword tool and SEOQuake specifically. Using just these two tools and a little bit of copying and pasting, you’ll be able to find out what your monthly earning potential would be for your keyword and I’ve even put in a little key at the bottom of the page to indicate how difficult it would be to start ranking on the first page of Google depending on the page rankings acquired from SEOQuake. Please keep in mind that Page Rank is just one of the many things that’s used for Google to place sites in their index, but it’s pretty much universally used as a good indicator of competition. Generally speaking, anything with an average page rank of under 3 is considered fairly reasonable, while if you can find an average of 2 or under and you should be able to break into that niche fairly easily. Page ranks of 3-5 are considered moderately difficult, meaning it would take much more backlink building, time and effort to break into the top listings of Google for the chosen keyword. Anything over 5, and you’ve got to be willing to put in many months, if not years of work to try and break into that market. If you’re just starting out, you’ll definitely want to stick in the low 2’s or under. The higher the average page rank, and the more likely you are to give up before you see any real results.
So, I’m providing a link to the Google Document I called the Adsense Estimator. A couple of things to know – if you have a Google account (gmail, adsense, whatever), then you’ll be able to make a copy of the document and save it in your own Google documents. If you don’t have your own Google account, you’ll still be able to download the file to your desktop in a number of different formats that Google provides. If you don’t have a spreadsheet on your computer, check out www.openoffice.org as they have a free suite that’s similar to Microsoft Office and is a great set of software.
A couple of notes. The values shown in the estimator are based off Adsense and Adsense alone. In other words, that’s just one avenue of making money online. If you find a keyword where you could only make $50/month, but you know that there are a number of affiliate products out there on ClickBank, Amazon or whatever, those sources of income are not reflected in the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is just a guide for the type of money you could make based off click throughs using Google Adsense – so use this as a guide, not the end-all, be-all.
And lastly, feel free to share this with anyone you know. I will gladly take suggestions and make updates to the core document if anyone sees something that can be improved. There will soon be a series of videos to show you how to research keywords using various free tools and this spreadsheet for tracking niches you should go after.
Go to the Google Document Here: Niche Keyword Adsense Estimator