$100 A Day Adsense Journey (Part 1)

It has been one hell of a week from losing my car keys, storing my car for the winter as the roads are salted, and finally getting time to sit down and write this.

I know many of you have been asking me about when I was going to get this post up because you wanted to follow along. Well, here it is! Let’s make some money together!

If this is the first time you are seeing this blog, this post will be following the $100 A Day Adsense Guide that I posted last month.

I also decided to call this a Journey instead of a Case Study because my hope is that you will follow along with me, taking the same steps I do, in a journey to reach $100 a day.

Finding a profitable Adsense Niche

The first step in this entire guide was to find a profitable Google Adsense niche. If you have a fun niche that is great, but if it has a low cost per click and high competition, you may work hard but see little to no payout.

Recently, Matthew Woodward posted an article about how to find proven money making niches using Flippa. As I read it, I noticed that this is basically what I have been doing since I started internet marketing. If you haven’t seen that post, I suggest you read it!

The basic method is to go to Flippa.com and find niches that have been consistently showing an income over a period of time (typically 6+ months in my case). You can then steal their backlinks and make a better site, but that can be saved for another post.

Adsense Niche Acquired!

As I am sure some of you may have, I have an excel file of many different niches that I may want to look into. A lot of these were found using the above method. I quickly ran through my list and checked the Keyword Planner to see if they had a decent amount of searches as well as a decent CPC.

I also did some quick Google searches to check the competition of the key phrases I thought would be best. I found a niche that I think will be VERY lucrative in the long run. The stats of my chosen niche are below:

Niche Stats

• Main keyword = 70,000+ searches a month
• A decent CPC
• Beatable competition in Google
• Not a seasonal Keyword

**At this point, take a break from this article and go find a profitable niche. It is very important that you spend a good chunk of time on this step.

Make sure to refer back to http://www.passive.marketing/100-a-day-adsense-guide/ for information on exactly what you are looking for (many searches, high CPC, not seasonal, ect.) as well as information on how to check the top 10 for competition to see if you stand a chance.

*** Another word of quick advice that I see many people getting wrong. When you are using the Keyword planner to check out keywords, the competition there is NOT SEO competition. It is simply the competition of how many advertisers are bidding for that keyword.

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Domain and WordPress Theme

For my domain name, I decided to deviate away from the original guide a bit. I still recommend that you go for a domain that has your main keyword in it as well as a prefix. However, for my Adsense site that I started for this site, I wanted to create a complete resource within my chosen niche.

Therefor, I went with a very brandable domain that people are going to remember and hopefully be more willing to link to! I also chose to go with a .com domain, which I would recommend you do as well.

If you have not done so, head on over to Namecheap and pick up your domain. I simply like to buy my domains from Namecheap because they offer free WhoisGuard for the first year which protects your personal information.

WordPress Theme

Selection of a WordPress theme is going to be of some importance here. Back before I really got into intner marketing, I had a good domain with almost 100k unique words on content on it barely making any money through Adsense. This was mainly due to the theme I was using.

You want a theme that puts the ads in places that the user is most likely to see first and click. You also want a simple looking site. Do not distract the user from the ads with fancy graphics. Remember, they are there to read content (and hopefully click ads).

As you can see from the heatmap image, users are more likely to click on the upper left corner of the webpage. This is because this is the first place that the eye hits the screen since the majority of the world reads left to right.

What does this mean? Put a big Google Adsense Ad right there! Do not think about it, just do it!

I decided to go for a free theme for this project of mine, which is the exact one that this site is using: http://wordpress.org/themes/delicate.

If you want to spice it up a bit, have a look through any of the themes at ThemeForest. Remember, simple themes where you can ads in the upper left hand corner.

Set Up Your WordPress Plugins

At this point, you should have spent some time finding a good profitable niche.

You should have also purchased a domain name and picked out a decent theme where you can place ads that will get a good click through rate.

With that said, let’s set up some of the best plugins.

•  All in One SEO
• W3 Cache (My Tutorial)
• Google XML Sitemaps
• WP-DB-Backup
• Quick Adsense Plugin
• Google Analytics For WordPress
• Sociable For WordPress
• Login Lockdown

Once you have all those installed, take a while to go through them all and set them up.

I would suggest taking the time to follow my tutorial on w3 Cache as this will drastically speed up any WordPress site you put up.

Make sure that you build your sitemap after installing Google XML Sitemaps and then head over to Google Webmaster Tools and submit it. This will get your site indexed pretty quickly.

I have installed on these plugins on my site and set them all up in under 30 minutes. It may take you a bit longer the first time you are doing this, but it shouldn’t take you more than 1 hour.

Get The Content Flowing!

From the original Adsense Guide, I calculated that I would need around 200 clicks a day to get to the target of $100 a day through Adsense. This meant that if I have a click through rate of 10%, I will need about 2000 visitors a day. This equates to around 80-100 articles.

However, I like to aim BIG. For the site I am working on, I wanted to create a complete resource within the niche I found. When I am all done, my Adsense site should have around 250k words of unique content, which is around 500 unique articles.

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Do you have the right mental attitude? I know 500 articles may seem like an insane goal, but it WILL happen. Hopefully I can blow the $100 a day right out of the water.

Niche Analysis

Before you actually start this process, take a look at the first thread and make sure you have done your deep niche analysis to get common questions or problems people are having in your niche. This will help creating articles MUCH easier.

Also take the time to find long tail keywords as well as taking a look at Market Samurai to get some “low hanging fruit” keywords you can write about.

Refer to the first thread right here where I go in depth about all of this.

Content So Far

So far I have put up 30 articles onto the site that are all unique which equates to around 18k words. I have a long way to go.

I decided that I will not put Adsense on the site until I am getting at least 100 visitors a day from Google. Currently, I am not really receiving any visitors, but that is because I have not started SEO yet.

SEO (The Beginning)

Since I still have a LOT of content to create and add to the site before I start seriously looking into ranking the site, I thought I would spend a few hours tonight doing some blogger outreach.

I opened up Technorati and took a look at my particular niche. I then went down the list and started emailing and contacting each site to see if they would be interested in featuring my site, or perhaps getting paid to give me a backlink to my site.

So far, out of about 20 emails, I have received one response. I thought I would share it with you to brighten your day.

Hi Neil
Paid links are against Google’s terms of service and can result in both of us having our sites de-indexed.  Sorry that I can’t work with you.  I think you’d be better off either working with a blogger on a sponsored post (I charge $150) or simply connecting with bloggers and introducing them to your site and asking for them to consider writing about it.

You can not win each and every time!

Conclusion

I really hope you have been following me and doing each step as I do them. My hope is that at this part of the journey you have a domain set up with all the plugins you will need and are building out the content to the site.

If you have not started yet, what are you waiting for? Money will not grow on a tree unless you first take the time to plant the seed.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below.

You can also simply let me know how your own Adsense site is coming along. I would love to see your progress!