Your scalability for making money with Adsense depends heavily on your ability to find and select profitable niches time and time again. In other words, if you want to make big money with Adsense, you need to know how to come up with good keywords. Keyword sniping allows you to target a select keyword, or group of keywords, but this process obviously doesn’t work if you chose bad keywords in the first place. Your keyword selection will determine in large part your ability to make money through internet marketing.

I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours talking to business owners and online entrepreneurs on the phone, helping them to find and select profitable niches and keywords. Based on my experience in this arena, I can tell you that most people really struggle to come up with new ideas for keywords. If this is the case for you, I want to help you to learn to overcome this pitfall - anyone can learn the creative ability required to come up with new ideas for keywords.

Keyword Creativity Exercise

In order to find new niches that you haven’t thought of before, I want you to try this little exercise. Some of you may be able to do this in your mind and some of you will need to actually go through this process to make it work. What I want you to do is very simple - I want to take the next 30 minutes to do some brainstorming in a way that you probably haven’t done before. I’m going to assume that right now you’re sitting in your chair so it’s all going to begin right there.

For this brainstorming exercise, I want you to start at your desk. You will need a notepad or paper of some kind, and a pen or pencil. From there, you will go outside and get in your car. You will then drive around your town or city for about 20 minutes, and then you will come back home. You will, of course, finish up at your desk.

Now before you begin this journey, I want to help you to get in the proper mindset. I want you to treat everything you see and everything you look at as a possible niche. You have to write down everything you think of and everything you see. It would be very helpful if you could take a scribe along with you, but if you’re not able to do that you can simply stop your car to write. For those of you that don’t have cars, I think you will find that walking around town will be equally effective and you can do that without a scribe.

Now before you start this exercise, you have to assume that everything you can see could make you money. In order to help you to see how effective this can be, I want to give you a sample of what I would be thinking if I went through this exercise myself.

Starting at my desk, I can see quite a few things that may or may not be profitable niches. In order to make this work, you have to assume that everything could be profitable. We’ll filter out the losers later. This is what I see at my desk:

• Dell Laptop
• Macbook
• CDs
• Microsoft Mouse
• Logitech Speakers
• Microsoft Webcam
• Wallet
• Chapstick
• Dollar Bills
• Duracell Batteries
• Sharpie Marker
• Yellow Notepad
• Checkbook
• Zig Ziglar CDs (Audiobook)
• Desk

Now I’m going to turn around to see what else is between me and the door to my room:

• Space Heater
• Playing Cards
• RCA Television
• Cell Phone Owner’s Manual
• Dish Network Satellite Receiver
• 6-pack of Diet Mountain Dew (24 oz. bottles)
• Casio Digital Camera
• Flip-flops
• A Pair of BKE Jeans
• Carpet
• Bed
• Sheets
• Pillows
• Comforter
• Seagull Guitar

Ok now this is what I can see between my bedroom and my car:

• Stairs
• Bookshelf
• Books (lots of authors here)
• Floor-mat
• Ice
• Snow
• Handrail
• Door
• Doorknob

Now I’m looking at my car:

• Wheels
• Tires
• Engine
• Suspension
• Transmission
• Performance Chip (not that I have one, I just thought of this for some reason)
• Snow Brush/Scraper
• Board Games (They’re in my back seat because I just went to my parents house and took them down there with me.)
• In-dash CD Player
• Harman Kardon Speakers

Ok now I’m going to start my car and start backing up:

• Garage Door Opener
• Garbage Can
• Used Furniture (In my garage - it happens to be open so I can see into it.)
• Old Golf Clubs
• Linksys Router
• Honda Motorcycle
• Ford Car
• Jeep Liberty
• Honda Accord
• Lexus IS250

Now I’m going to start my drive around town:

• Snow Scraper Truck (spreading salt)
• Snow Shovel
• Town Houses
• Apartments
• Snow Jacket (I see two girls walking - both are wearing jackets)
• Jeans
• Running Shoes (someone is running)
• Headband
• Comcast Truck
• Rain Gutter
• Windows
• Yard Gnomes
• Garden Decor
• Water Park
• Boys and Girls Club
• Park Statues
• Fairer Middle School
• Swingsets
• Jungle Gym
• Basketball Standards (Rims, nets, basketballs)
• Grass (Fertilizer - can’t see it but thought of it.)
• Checker Auto Parts
• Grocery Store
• Vacuum Store
• Thai Restaurant
• Auto Shop
• Kia Dealer
• Acupuncture Clinic (might be a good one!)
• Dentist’s Office
• Shaklee Sign on a House

Ok guys let’s assume that the drive is over, and now I’m going to come back to my desk. The honest truth is that I never left in the first place - you can do the entire exercise in your head with enough practice. By now you should have all of this stuff written down so that you can start doing research into each of the items on your list. If you struggled to find what you were looking for I would recommend heading to the mall - that place is keyword heaven.

Now what you’re going to do is start doing keyword research on each of the items that you were able to come up with. This will probably take you half of a day, but by the end you should have quite a few profitable niches that you can target in the future.

Let’s start with the first idea I came up with and go from there. Let’s see, the first item on the list was ‘Dell Laptop’. I’m going to open up the Wordze keyword research tool. If you don’t have Wordze yet you can use Wordtracker free. I’m going to type in ‘dell laptop’ to see what we get. Here are the first keywords that come back, with their search volumes:

• dell laptop (2108)
• dell laptop batteries (626)
• dell laptop parts (504)
• dell laptop computers (380)
• dell laptop cover (288)
• find dell laptop batteries (256)

So we have some words and some search volume numbers with Wordze, you are going to find that these numbers are pretty high. Why? Because Wordze tries to estimate daily search volume across all search engines (all versions of Google in different countries, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) Since you will probably do the best with the U.S. version of Google (if you use a .com domain), your search volume will be lower than these numbers. Based on my experience, your true number of hits if you’re ranked #1 in Google will be about 25-50% of the numbers you see here.

For those using Wordtracker free, it’s honestly less accurate and the numbers tend to be a little low. It can still do the job though.

Now some of you are going to say, “How much search volume are we looking for?” It’s hard to give a number in stone, but I would make sure that you can get at least 100 hits per day with a niche site, and that means that you need to see at least 200 in Wordze. Obviously, a higher number will give you a shot at more traffic.

Competition Evaluation

Let’s take a look at what kind of competition we would have for some of these keywords. Let’s look at ‘dell laptop batteries’. The first thing we are going to do is search for the keyword in Google, adding quotes around it. This will tell us how many pages in Google the keyword is actually found on. Looks like it’s coming up on over 466,000 pages. That’s way too many for a niche site. That means we throw out that keyword - it’s horrible.

Let’s take a look instead at ‘find dell laptop batteries’. Now this is more like it, searching for it in Google with quotes returns only 3,110 results. Now we’re going to take off the quotes in Google to see who really is ranked well for that keyword. The first result is from Dell.com - that one might be hard to beat, but the rest of them are pretty weak. When I look at the titles in Google’s listings, none of them even have the keyword in there.

For those of you that have Wordze, here is where it can really come in handy. You can open up a tool in Wordze called WordRank. By searching for this keyword with the WordRank tool, you can find out how old the domains are that you’re going up against and you can find out how many links they’re picking up each month. The #1 site for this keyword picks up over 1,700 links per month and that would make them pretty hard to beat. However, #2 only picks up 14 links per month and #3 only picks up nine links per month. That makes them pretty easy to beat.

Even though this keyword’s search volume is a little low, it would probably be worth targeting because it would be pretty easy to get ranked for.

Advertiser Competition

Before we actually target this keyword, we want to make sure that advertisers are actually paying out for this phrase, or it will be worthless. To find this out, we’re going to use the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool. I would type in ‘dell laptop batteries’ since Adsense will probably show ads using that phrase.

Since we want to see what the click prices will be, you are going to want to click the drop-down box that says ’show/hide columns’ and select ‘Show Estimated Average CPC’. Since you want to see the maximum you could get, I would put 100 into the box next to U.S. dollars and you will then click ‘recalculate’. You’ll see that most of the keywords on the list are worth $2-$3. That means that you will be able to get somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 per click. That’s actually pretty good.

Now what you need to do guys is break down every item you came up with by brainstorming. I can tell you that you will find some that are much better than the one we came up with. You might find some with higher click prices. You will find some with more search volume. Take a day and look at a few hundred words and I can tell you that you’ll start to get more of a feel for what will work and what won’t.

I know that this is a complicated subject, and for that reason I’m going to open up the gates again and let you ask all the questions you would like to ask on this subject. You can use the comments for this, please don’t use email or I have to answer the same questions like 20 times.