This is a little bit of research that I did back in March 2006 (yes, in 2006). I was trying to figure out which topics to focus on then and just to get a feel of the competition and the monetization potential. I can’t do something like that conveniently now cos many of the tools like overture and digital point have been blocked in China (yes again, that’s where I’m living now).
I’m a systematic person, so here’s the steps that I took:
a) List the keywords
b) Find out how many people search the keywords per day; this is using Digital Point keyword suggestion. From there, you get a feel of how many people are interested in the topic.
c) Check out the amount of competition, that’s where I record the “No. of Pages”. So for instance, you can see that many more people searches “Learn Chinese” as opposed to “Learn Mandarin” but there are also more webpages (110m vs 5m)!
d) To know whether the competition is strong, you can check out the page rank of the top site. You can download various free pagerank tools and see if your top competition site is very strong in your selected keywords. The lower the score the easier for you to overtake.
e) Then if you are interested in earning advertising money, you can check out the Google Adsense Sandbox Tool and see if the topic you selected will have advertisers willing to pay more $ for as well as the list of current advertisements. I also came up with my own weighting system for the advertisement by giving less weight to a lower $ advertisement.
f) Finally, I prioritise the keywords and as you can see, learning Chinese has higher advertising income potential but I did not go into that area cos it’s not my passion. And I was doing this research then just to see where my blog topic stands.. I doubt the theme of CluelessClay is ideal for making money but well, I don’t need the money, just people to read and understand Jesus better, support each other and if there’s one way I’m interested in earning money, it’s to be able to sell my cartoons someday.. God Bless!
p.s. Jesus said before it’s more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35)