Steps To Blogging Profitably

One of the earliest methods I used to start generating online income and one that has become a reliable source of money for me now, is the use of Adsense. Many people are dismissive of the effectiveness of monetizing a site with Adsense but if you do it right it can become a reliable income stream as part of your online portfolio.

Choosing a keyword niche to make money using Google Adsense is a rather delicate balancing act between finding keywords that
1 : will pay a decent amount per click
2 : are getting searched by a lot of people
3 : don’t have an overwhelming number of competing sites

Finding a set of niche keywords that meet these three requirements gives you a great starting point to the development of a profitable website. IT might be easy to find a high-paying keyword but if no-one is searching for it, you won’t be getting traffic or sales. Similarly you may find a keyword that is getting a lot of search traffic but the cost per click (CPC) is only a few cents. (This type of keyword may be more suitable for a different monetizing strategy).

When I first started out I was like a lot of other newcomers, very dubious as to whether I would actually make money with my blogs. My solution was to choose a niche keyword that didn’t attract a lot of search engine traffic that also had a low Adsense CPC. Rightly or wrongly, my rationale was that if I could make a profit with this particular niche, I could make a profit with just about any niche. The only attraction was that the niche wasn’t particularly competitive.

Naturally, if I were starting over again there would be no way I’d make the same decision because it has been bloody hard work. As it turned out, though, the niche has turned out not only to be profitable, but to be quite lucrative with monetization opportunities opening up other than Adsense. My early success motivated me sufficiently to start more niche sites and really have a go to try to earn money online.

I’ve had mixed success with selecting suitable niches since the first one, mainly because I have been too eager to get started, failing to put in the necessary keyword research first.

Keyword research, I’ve found, doesn’t apply solely to the number of searchers and the number of competitors you’re trying to outrank. It also applies to the quality of your competition and how difficult you’re going to have to work to outrank them. In other words, how many backlinks you’re going to have to attract to surpass your competitor’s backlinks.

After all has been said and done, every domain I have bought with the intention of aiming at drawing Adsense revenue has been profitable and I consider them to be successful. Success, to my mind, is reached when my site has earned more than the cost of domain registration plus it’s share of hosting for the year.

Honestly, though, it has only been my last 3 or 4 blogs where the CTR has been reasonably high, as has the CPC. But then, that’s what the learning process is all about.