How To Create High Income Websites
Posted on April 30, 2010
Filed Under Earn money online
When I showed how much an online business can earn per 100 visitors per month, most of you realized that your income is not at the similar levels as my best earning sites.
Inevitably, the question comes to mind: How do I create higher earning websites?
The easiest method of determining whether a site will be a high earning or a low earning one is to check the Adwords CPC numbers which tell you how much advertisers are willing to pay for a click. (I use Exact match in the examples below.)
Here are two examples…
1. The #4 site in the article mentioned above is earning $152 per 100 daily visitors per month. The Adwords CPC (cost per click) looks something like this:
I actually checked the numbers before going after this niche and knew that the payout will not be that great.
So why did I start the site anyway? Because the demand and supply numbers for many keywords were very good and I knew I could create a high traffic site (over 1000 daily visitors) in the long term.
And once you have lots of traffic, you have many options to find good monetization mix.
Also, I tested Adsense on that site and the average payout was less than 10 cents per click which is what you can expect based on my comparison between Adsense Search and content Adsense clicks.
I found that Chitika pays much better in that niche compared to Adsense so I removed it and now use mostly Chitika (and a few affiliate links) to monetize that site.
2. The #2 site (mentioned in the previous article) earns $457 per 100 daily visitors per month. Here’s how the Adsense CPC looks for that niche:
You can see that there is a very good corelation between the Adsense CPC numbers in Adwords and the actual income per site.
The CPC of the first site (#4) averages at around $1 and the CPC of the second site (#2) averages at around $3.50 – which is about 3 to 4 times more.
The actual income of site #2 is also about 3 times more than site #4: $457 is almost exactly 3 times $152.
How to Find High Paying Niches
I personally don’t have a system in place. I might check out Amazon.com for various products and test their CPC in the Adwords keyword tool or I might simply keep an open mind when I go about my usual life.
If I am in a shopping mall and I see something interesting, I remember that and then test the idea later at home in Adwords.
I might browse the Web, read about an interesting topic, service, future development and test that in Adwords.
There are also some sites that sell high paying Adsense keywords but I haven’t checked those in years – so I cannot recommend any.
Do a Google search on that term and use your own judgment whether you want to pay for those or whether you can find some free info on such topics.
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Comments
9 Responses to “How To Create High Income Websites”
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Hey Tomaz,
When using the Adword’s keyword tool do you also look at the competition field or are you just analysing the CPC numbers?
What other criteria do you look at before deciding which niche to develop a site around?
Thanks
[Reply]
Aamer,
You look at Adwords numbers to determine whether a niche pays well or not. I look at demand and competition in the SBI Brainstormer / MKL.
[Reply]
Hey Tomaz,
I decided on a 2nd and 3rd niche that are very closely related. Actually the 3rd niche is part of the 2nd website and I am very passionate about it.
I did your research and found the 2nd website to have average of $2, but the 3rd has a average of $6, which is awesome. I can’t wait to move forward with them in the coming year. Well mostly the 2nd website.
[Reply]
Tomaz Reply:
May 1st, 2010 at 3:19 am
Sounds good, Dwight. I also found that it’s really useful to have two related sites since you can link to each other but you can also do three-way link exchanges where you give a link to someone from the first site in return for a link to your second site.
[Reply]
Hi Tomaz,
You mention this 3-way exchange for links and I’ve had folks email me saying they’d prefer to do this over a simple link exchange because too many basic link exchanges may be viewed negatively by Google. Do you have any info about this ? Thanks.
[Reply]
Scott,
None of us (doing online stuff) has any definitive answers when it comes to Google. We don’t know.
I know that you really want know with 100% certainty what works and what doesn’t but you’ll have to let go of that desire.
You will never know. Google keeps their stuff secret – no way do I know for sure that three way-link exchanges are much better than reciprocal link exchanges.
From my perspective I give a one way link to one site and that site gives one way link to my other site.
While reciprocal linking is very easy to detect with algorithms, 3 way linking is definitely much harder – and I doubt that Google puts a lot of weight in terms of penalizations on this one.
It’s just my common sense, nothing else…
[Reply]
Tomaz, this is great! I just spent some time checking the AdSense CPC numbers for some of my main keywords and I found that the numbers are not too high (but not as low as the $152 example you mentioned above). This is giving me more confidence that I should be able to reach my income target with my current site concept, as long as I can build up the traffic to 1000+ daily visitors.
A question…
When selecting a new niche, when you assess competition, do you look purely at the supply/demand numbers in Brainstorm It!, or do you care about any other factors like existing sites? I’m guessing niches with higher CPC payouts have more competition.
Thanks!
[Reply]
Nisheth,
I typically look just at the Real Supply numbers to assess my competition. And yes, in most cases high CPC payouts suggest higher competition.
[Reply]
Tomaz,
I really appreciate this discussion on a site’s potential to generate income. While passion is important in the decision to build a site, the potential to generate income must be considered as well. Thanks for sharing parts of your business model.
[Reply]