Finding great phrases for Adsense site is real tough or is it?

I have been spending oodles of time doing keyword research and have read up on everything I can find on the subject but...it's REAL tough to find good one's to build Adsense sites around. I am wondering if I am making it tougher than it needs to be and would appreciate some input.

Many say it's easy and that they are all over the place. My experience tells me that this is simply not true anymore though some experienced marketers make it seem like a piece of cake.

My criteria for finding a good keyword phrase is as follows:

ECPC of $2.00 or more.
LSV (Local Search Volume) of at least 1000 per month.
MSV to be fairly in line with LSV (i.e. not way, way lower as would be indicative of seasonal phrases).
Google search competition with phrase in quotes: less than 50,000 other pages.
Total number of incoming links (internal or external): less than 100
Total number of incoming links from external domains: less than 100.
Payout estimate (based on my formula which is very conservative) of at least $20-30 per month (this is not a super important criteria but nevertheless one I consider).
Page Rank average of no more than 3 across the first 4 pages that show up in Google for a search on the phrase with no quotes.

Like I said I have found phrases that match my criteria but I have to do an aweful lot of number crunching and analysis to find them.

I use Google's keyword Tool exclusively along with an SEO plugin for Firefox to find the PR's and Yahoo to check the incoming links.

My overall strategy has been to find a set of related keyword phrases that I can build a five page web site around. More along the informational type of site but with a view to the topic being in an area that is likely to produce some income from being searched for by people who might want to buy something in it.

In other words 5 related phrases must all have the good numbers. If I find such I build a site around them all. Four sites so far.

Lately I have become a bit more flexible in not having 5 related phrases be all good. I've considered building a site around just one good phrase but then I am stuck wondering how to build the site out?

I hate the number crunching involved (and NO I do not want nor do I have the money to purchase new fangled, fancy software to do the work for me...not to mention that I run on Linux and will continue to do so. Most such software runs only under Windows and no...Linux wine...won't cut it for most).

Any input (other than that I need to buy some software or switch to Windows...yuk) would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Carlos

 

Yes keep taking a look at the keyword rankings and try building sites to rank high on them

 

You could build custom tools to automate the keyword analysis process. We did

 

Hmm...appreciate the input but it doesn't give me much to go on with respect to what if anything I could improve in my approach.

Anybody else got any input as to what I could be doing better? Differently?

Is it really this tough to find good keyphrases to build sites around?

Do you all build sites around just one good keyphrase or around a set of them? Do you build sites that are more informational or product oriented?

I've seen a whole lot of junk Adsense sites out there. There is a whole of lot of them that are just downright junk. Having little of any value of themselves.

I saw one just today that was in fourth place having 92 incoming links from some sports and babes forum that had absolutely not the slightest thing to do with the topic of the site.

It's amazing the junk that people up and create just to get an Adsense site up and running.

I want to create long term, stable web sites that aren't going to be knocked off when Google gets around to seeing how cheap of a site I might build (if I was inclined to build junk).

Anyway thanks for the input you all. Much appreciated.

Carlos