Adsense is one of the best ways in which a person can make money online. There are 2 important reasons behind this: 1. The whole economical system behind Adwords/Adsense is a very competitive and lucrative one;  2. People only have to click in order for you to make money. They don’t have to buy or fill in a form. So how do you choose a niche that will make you money with Adsense?

I’ve only stumbled upon a handful of sites owned by people who really know how to do this. Now I know I may be spoiling Grizz with lots of link love, but his make money online site is hands down the best when it comes to Adsense tips. I personally take into consideration 4 important aspects, which, after a combined analysis of all of them, give me a profitable niche. Each of them is equally important, so don’t make the mistake of choosing a niche basing your choice on only one of these factors. So, in no particular order:

1. Average CPC of the keyword/niche
When you enter your desired keyword in the Google keyword tool, it will show you the estimated average cost per click. For example, in the case of “blue bike” (I’m out of widgets), the average CPC is $0.81. Now, this is what advertisers are paying in order to be placed on one of the 3 spots in Google search.

Now, what you need to understand is the fact that you will never actually receive $0.81 for a click on this keyword. Depending on the actual spot inside the block that the visitor clicks and the position of the block on your page, you will probably be able to get somewhere in between 2 cents to 35 cents per click. So what determines how much you get?

Ok… First thing: what ad block has been clicked? If you have 3 ad blocks on a page and the visitor clicks an ad from the last block, you will get much lower clicks than if the visitor clicks the first ad block on your page. This is why it is important that you place your most clicked ad block to be the first on the page. Which ad block is the first on the page is determined by the order in which they appear in the source code of your website. You can use CSS in order to place these blocks exactly as you want.

Then, the second thing: which listing from the ad block has been clicked? Was it the first one or the fourth one? This can make a big difference. While you can’t control this particular aspect, you can certainly control the first one. And this ends the explanation of why certain clicks are worth more and certain clicks are worth less. In the particular example of “blue bike”, I would expect the overall average click on the site to be somewhere around 20 cents / click.

2. Traffic of the keyword / niche
If you are quick to dismiss a keyword just after seeing a low CPC like 20 or 30 cents, you still have a lot to learn, because as I said, there are 4 factors that make up a profitable Adsense niche. So, now you need to analyze the traffic of the keyword or niche.

In the case of “blue bike”, the average monthly volume in the broad match type is 33,100. However, it would be wise to take the phrase or the exact match into consideration. I personally take the phrase match into consideration. What’s the difference between them?

Broad match means that the keywords that were searched for and incorporated into the count had the keyword in them, in any order. For example: “should I buy a bike that is blue” will be incorporated into the “blue bike” broad volume.

Phrase match means that the keywords that were searched for had the exact phrase in them. The example from the broad match would not fit into the phrase match. However, “should I buy a blue bike” will be incorporated into the phrase match.

Finally, exact match, means exactly what it says. People who are searching for “blue bike” only, no other strings attached. I prefer phrase match because it shows me the potential of the niche better than the exact match, since there may be lots of keyword variations.

3. Competition of the keyword / niche
I analyze competition taking only one thing into account. The “allintitle” count. The allintitle operator will show you the number of pages that have the keyword you specify in their titles. This is a good way to establish how many pages are optimized precisely with that keyword in mind.

In our case, “allintitle:blue bike” returns 40,000 pages. That’s pretty competitive but doable, if all the other factors are favorable. Also, you must take into consideration all the long tails. While you may have a core keyword with lots of competing sites, maybe the long tails alone are worth it.

Allintitle for “blue bike parts” is 634. Anything under 1,000 should be easy to dominate; “allintitle:bayview cruiser bike blue” returns only 23 results, that should be a walk in the park. So if you have many of these easy to dominate long tail keywords that get decent traffic, that is a very good sign.

4. The “clickability” of the niche
This is a term that I just coined up. This is the final factor that I had to incorporate into my analysis the hard way. There are certain niches where people will simply not click. Anything that is related to computers, where people are usually computer savvy, is usually not a good Adsense niche.

So, would I choose the “blue bike” niche? Nope, I wouldn’t. Why choose this niche when you can always go for blue widgets? Now seriously, I wouldn’t bother with this, but you need to make your own combination of what is acceptable or not based on your own proficiency. Just make sure that you take all of these four factors into account together, not separately.