STEP 2: Find your niche
To help you find your niche topic, read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.
Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.
Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.
You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.
Choose a topic that is easy to write about.
Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.
You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck - and a bit of keyword research - you may be able to do both.
Examine your potential competitors
If you're considering building a site about hiking boots, type "hiking boots" (using quotation marks) into Google and Yahoo! and carefully examine the top 10 sites which appear in the search results.
They're your real competitors. Can you create a better, more interesting, more useful site? Can you think of a new angle, a new approach?
Do those top 10 sites all have high PageRank - say 6 or more? If so, you'll have to work really hard to get in the top 10.
Let's say the top 3 sites in Google are PageRank 8, 7 and 6. If so, you'll probably have to work hard for a couple of years or more to outrank them. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but it will require either a great deal of work, or a very innovative, eye-catching approach.
You can quickly check the PageRank of your potential competitors by using Seochat's free online tool - http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search . Type in "hiking boots" or whatever and you'll be able to see the PageRank of the top 10 sites.
Do those sites all have the phrase in the title? (The title is the words that appear at the very top of your screen when you visit a site.) If not, you may be able to beat them.
How many links do your potential competitors have?
Do your potential competitors all have thousands of links to them? This is important, because links are important to search engines. You need good, relevant links to your site. To find out how many sites are linking to a site, use the free Yahoo! Site Explorer. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - and login (set up a free account if necessary).
Type the URL of the site you want to explore.
Click on "Explore URL".
Click on "Inlinks".
Modify your search to make it more useful. Select the options to show Inlinks "except from this domain" and "entire site". This will exclude internal links and show you all external links that Yahoo! knows about to ANY page of the website.
If your potential sites have thousands of links to them, they're likely to be very tough competitors.
Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...
STEP 3. Choose a profitable niche
Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you're considering. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing (it used to be called Overture) and AdWords.
You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.
You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.
Here's a useful free tool I like using for quick, rough keyword research: pixelfast.com/overture/ (Unfortunately, this free tool is based on the free Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool which Yahoo! doesn't bother maintaining properly. Sometimes it doesn't work.)
Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Overture network of web sites.
You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. For example, it gives you the SAME results for "wool rug" and "rug wool", which is ridiculous. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.
Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a week. I use the annual subscription now.
Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. Here's how.
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and play around with the free Keyword Tool.
For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (You can choose any currency. I chose US.)
Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.
The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases.
Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "free", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.
You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.
If you use Site Build It to build your site, you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.
Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.
Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.
For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US
Advertisers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear on your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads.
For more accurate research, you can also use the free AdSense preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.
Another niche-finding tool I'm very fond of is Myleena's NicheInspector. Using this powerful tool will save you a LOT of time, because it automates a great deal of the work. If you're going to get this tool, make sure you read her free report before you start using it, because her free report explains why she uses the methods she does.
Don't make any firm decision on your niche until you've taken the next step...
