AdSense Revenue is all about Knowing Your Niche In and Out

Every blogger once in his life hears the suggestion/command/decree to “find your own voice.” And none more so than a niche blogger. Any niche blogger would love to have a blog where they can write in their preferred style while making sure their Adsense revenues (that is, if they are indeed monetizing, which they should) don’t lag.

But how to go about in deciding the best niche that will let you find the freedom of writing what you want to write while empowering you to earn what you want to earn?

What is your Niche?

To begin with, a simple definition of niche:

As you can see, the definition that is most relevant to us is number 3. “A specialized but profitable segment of the market”. A Niche Blog is all about the balance between mainstream and esoteric. It is a highly specific, exclusive information which is being shared on the web for consumption. A Niche Blog is a balanced approach. It’s not overtly mainstream and it’s not entirely underground.

So consider these personal factors, relevant to your individual context before selecting a niche:

First-Hand Experience: Is the Niche you’re interested in a topic you’re well versed in? First hand experience allows you to write in an active, first person voice that makes you appear credible, trustworthy and genuinely reliable. You can always learn the skills/knowledge that is required to cover the niche you want to. But that is the key! Insider perspective on any subject is what separates an expert from an enthusiast and an enthusiast from an amateur.

First Mover Advantage: Is there a lot of competition in your Niche? Are there a lot of new emergent players in the niche who are at the same step where you are or are they ahead of you? A Competitor Analysis is very important for the very simple reason that you need to know what others are doing to set yourself apart. Not enough to be entirely irrelevant. Just enough to bring a new perspective for the reader who is here for your unique value proposition.

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Resources: Is your niche resource indifferent? Do you have the necessary resources to conduct your research, understand the nuance and be able to articulate key insights about your Niche?

Research and Reading: Before you start writing, read. Then read some more. Then write. And read while you’re writing. And finish writing and then read what others might have written on the same subject. Research is always the key ingredient that sets you apart from others.

Technology: Is your niche about technology or something else? Arts? Coffee? If you’re a coffee blogger, you should know about the technology in the coffee industry. What grinders, what roasters, what farming techniques, what coffee machines and makers and many other accessories. These minor details allow you to quote information that others may not have.

Content: Once you make sure that you’re rock solid on your niche, consider the content. Do you have enough to have your own blog? Don’t worry if you don’t. You can always either expand your knowledge or you can write guest posts for other publications who will distribute your niche content. Either ways, take a cold hard look at the amount of content you estimate to churn out over a bench mark period, be it six months or a year or more.

Time: Always understand that Blogging may not be a full-time job but it is a time-consuming activity. A Good blog may take months to become popular while there is also a possibility that one single blog post of your can go viral and create many opportunities for you.

AdSense Expectations: Adsense Revenue is a side-stream income opportunity for most bloggers. In fact, only 4% of Niche Bloggers actually rely on Blogging as their sole source of income. So if you’re planning to go full-time into Niche Blogging, be ready to invest a good amount of time in it to generate the Adsense earnings you want.

Now, let’s say you’re green lighted by yourself on all these. Next comes the magic of Keywords.

The Keywords

As a blogger, you should be very aware of the Google Keyword Planner Tool for more reasons than one. But right now, let’s just focus on finding the perfect words that define your niche.

So for example, if you’re a blogger who wants to write about coffee including reviews about roasters, cafés, and popular and innovative coffee recipes. What you need to know are the best keywords that go with coffee. These keywords are what your users will put in the Google search bar to find the blogs such as yours.

This is where Google’s Keyword Planner tool with help you find what you need. By putting in a few terms in the Keyword Planner, you will get to see Average Monthly Searches, Competition, Suggested Bids as well as Advertisement Impression Shares for each keyword. Too much? Let me explain it below. For now, Here’s a simple visual to help you:

This is a screen-shot of a simple search of few terms I used such as:

• blogs about coffee
• coffee blogs
• artisan coffee blog
• artisan coffee,
• coffee review blogs
• coffee recipes blog

Before we begin analyzing, let’s take a look at what each of the columns in the Keyword Ideas Tab means.

Average Monthly Searches: See that small question mark after “searches”? If you click on it, Google Keyword Planner Tool explains Avg. Monthly Searches as follows:

“The average number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the date range and targeting settings that you’ve selected.

Meaning the Average Monthly Searches gives you a comparative idea of how popular a keyword is. In the screen shot, note that the keyword “artisan coffee” has 2400 monthly searches while something as general as “coffee blogs” has about 880 and “blogs about coffee” has only 50 avg. monthly searches.

In this case, the reason why “artisan coffee” is a very good niche based keyword is because a lot of your potential audience is interested in learning about artisan coffee and how it differs from your usual departmental store coffee.

Meanwhile, coffee blogs is a search term that many users use to find blogs that relate to coffee. Despite being a general term, it is fairly specific.

A Good way to decide on your keywords is to take into account the highly specific, high paying niche keywords such as “artisan coffee” and balance them with a high-medium traffic long-tail or generic keyword such as “coffee blog”.

Pro Tip: Aim for a figure between 300 – 1500 for Average Monthly searches.

Competition: Your competition is naturally fellow bloggers/advertisers/publishers who are writing on similar lines while featuring these keywords in their content.

Suggested Bids: Suggested Bids are the amount that Advertisers are willing to pay for an ad-placement on your blog for the particular region/niche. These suggested bids are an estimated figure and can differ from your actual cost-per-click amount.

Ad Imp. share: Ad Impression Share is the number of Ad impressions received by an ad divided by the number of searches for the relevant keyword. A useful measure to track the potential of clicks and impressions for this particular keyword such as “artisan coffee”.

Hack: If you don’t want to bother with all the information Google Keywords throw at you, you can check out Keyword.io, a simpler, cleaner tool for Niche evaluation.

AdSense Revenue is all about Knowing Your Niche In and Out

Alright, so you know the Keywords. You know you want to write about Artisan Coffee on your blog. This is your Niche. Now comes your expertise in form of Content. Do you like Longform blog posts such as this one? Or would you like to record videos of you brewing coffee? Or do you want a cool infographic about all the ingredients and cooking recipes and how to find them?

The choice is yours. But your best Adsense Revenue stream is when you take care of a few things such as :

Consistency: If you want good traffic, you need good content. And you need good content with a regular calendar. Which means your niche is important because you should have a lot of expertise and a lot of first hand perspectives about it.

Quality: Google loves Longform content. But Google hates unoriginal/spurious content. Google is like a strict school teacher for us bloggers! But on a serious note, whether you go with videos or longform content, infographics or white papers, remember that Quality is far more important than quality. Your Adsense Revenue comes from your readers. And they won’t come to your blog if you do not provide a benchmark of quality as well as useful value. Which brings us to our next major factor:

Value: Your Niche Blog is going to be popular not solely because it talks about an exclusive or esoteric topic, but because it reveals something new and useful/entertaining. Either make them smile or solve their problem. Users who find either of the two, always subscribe, always visit.

Use The Resources on the Web for Understanding Your Niche:

You can always get a better idea of which Niche is most lucrative via Adsense earnings. A simple search can tell you which are the niches that pay the best in Adsense Revenue. For starters, here are the top 10 Profitable Niches in Google AdSense to help you out.

Your Ads Should relate/reflect your Niche

When you invite ads on your Blog, make sure to maintain the readability and the User Experience. Don’t copy a popular blog you look up to and blatantly post ads here and there. The webpage is premium real estate. Use it well. Your users are here for the information from your content, not from the advertising first.

Find Your Voice. Own Your Blog. 

When you start your niche blog, make sure you become a credible authority. That also means keeping a sharp eye on which Ad Network best suits your needs. There are several great alternatives to Google AdSense, such as Medianet, Bidvertiser, and more. 

The Most Important Factor: Your niche is about your best skills and your passion coming together to achieve something. Don’t take it lightly. Give it all your get. And if you ever need to solve a problem, feel free to drop in a comment and we’d love to help.