I didn't think I would end up writing this much so I'll make this a thread. It's 1000 percent possible to make $100 a day on Adsense. What you need to do is pick a good keyword with low comp and high CPC, buy an exact match domain, and then SEO it to kingdom come. To elaborate, Google "Market Samurai". It is paid software that gives you a full-access trial for 14 days. It lets you do research on keywords and competition. The modules will b self-explanatory like "find keywords" and "SEO competition". When I first used it I had trouble figuring out how it worked. It's acutally quite easy to navigate after you spend an hour or two clicking buttons and reading the FAQs and vids on the site. Alright so you have it downloaded and installed now you need to go keyword research and brainstorm some keywords. When you have them, click generate keywords and MS will give you a list of similar LSI keywords for you to analyze. Analyze them and then sort them however you want. I sort them by SEOT or the estimated traffic/searches a keyword will receive in #1 (usually 40% of daily searches). Now the easiest way to pick great keywords is to use filters, specifically, the golden rules one. I pick keywords by picking any keyword will less than 30,000 matches in the title, higher CPC than $1.00, and at least 100+ daily searches. Next you check you the competition. Here there are two important things. BLP and the SEO optimization. The other factors count but I like to look at these more. I also disregard PR completely. Take a look at the top 3. Do they have high BLP (1000+)? Is everything in Red? You probably shouldn't go for this one, especially if it's all authority sites (high BLD and domain age). If all is good and there's lots of green, check out the top 3's backlinks. Are they high PR? Varied? Targeting your keyword? If not you have a winner. Next is picking the domain name. You'll want to pick out a TLD, a .com, .org, or .net, nothing else. In my experiences it's very hard ranking a .info and I'm not a fan of country TLDs because with a little more effort you can rank in all languages easily. Try to find an exact match ie. for blue widget, get bluewidget.com. If you can't, don't be afraid to add hyphens. Many people think that adding hyphens kills their domain SEO advantage but it doesn't with enough backlinks. Now if you can't even get hyphens for your domains, I suggest you go back to your keyword research and try it again because that means the niche is too competitive. Finally, for the SEO. I'm not going to explain on-page SEO because it's tedious and easy to learn. Basically, fill all the meta data, use h1,h2 tags with keywords, keep keyword density below 5% for your keyword but above 1%, use bold, italics, etc. For the off-page SEO many people go bananas about what you need to do. Some people say do article marketing for backlinks and exposure, use a bunch of web 2.0s and juice those up, use super targeted niche comments, link exchanges etc. I can't say that I know everything about the best off-page SEO procedure because I don't, no one does except for those at Google. What I found that works for me is building a ton of different forum links. Everyone is always scared about the sandbox and such but the way I build links I'm never scared of it, I even embrace it. When your site is sandboxed it's an indication that Google has a hard time trying to place your site where it thinks it belongs. It's not a direct penalty (though to established businesses, it is). If you are starting a new site I suggest you disregard the sandbox and act like it doesn't exist. Just build links directly. You don't need to build satellites and carefully plot every backlink to your site to make sure you don't get sandboxed. Let me tell you something. If your site is new you ARE going to get sandboxed whether you like it or not (unless you go after a super non-competitive keyword that no one actively ranks for like pinkblueflabberturtles). As long as you keep building links to the site you will eventually get out of the sandbox sooner than later. If you are still scared of it I suggest you build a ton of links to it BUT do not get them indexed all at once. That is sure to throw you in the sandbox. If you ping them, rss them, and ultimately index on a day-to-day basis keeping a steady velocity (for example, 150 a day) then you can avoid the sandbox for some time while still being to rank higher each day. As long as your site doesn't get de-indexed for breaking Google's policies or something (I never had a site de-indexed so I can't say much on this subject) then you got nothing to worry about. I'd also like to say that it's not completely about the number of backlinks to your site, but hear me out. Sure, a high on-page PR backlink (niche-specific or not) is an invaluable asset to your linkbuilding, and you will generally see a great boost to your site if it's new (I once managed to get a on-page pr5, that's on page not domain PR, link and it boosted a site that was competing for a mid comp keyword, 1 mil searches in quotes, authority sites in top 10,etc. from pos #300 to pos#175. Even if the comp was weak at those positions, it was still a huge jump), but it's going to be hard as heck to continue finding these great links without paying for it (it took me a month on scrapebox to find that link, lucky for me the closed the comments section so now I have a stable link as long as they don't delete that page). Now if that site is taken down or is no longer active, then my site will take a serious hit and fall in the SERPS whereas if you have many links if you lose one, two, or even thousand, you'll still have a good foothold on the competition. Oh and like I was saying, it's not about the sheer number of backlinks either. Someone with 100 backlinks can outrank comp with 10,000+ backlinks easily. If you go with high volume backlinking, you'll want to build backlinks from a bunch of different sites, and not form 1 site. 100 backlinks from 100 different sites is way better than 1,000 links from 10 different sites assuming they have similar weight. Getting 1,000 backlinks form one site happens much easier than you may think. I once posted a comment on one blog and when I checked later I had over 1,000 links from that one site spread throughout it's tags, categories etc. Needless to say it didn't help my ranking at all. Few sorry for the walls of text I just wanted to say that. I'm not done but at this point I don't think I'm helping the OP too much if he doesn't understand what I'm talking about. To recap: 1) Use MS to do keyword research 2) Snag some good keywords 3) Get a good exact match domain (multiplies your SEO efforts later, easiest part to do) 4) *I didn't discuss this but you need to have relevant content to your keyword, not hard just write articles about it or outsource it to other people* 5) Do some backlinking or outsource it to other people so you can rise to No.1 in Google 6) BAM - If you did your homework you should have at least a $5-10/a day site on Adsense no problem 7) Do that x10 over, gets easier everytime, and whammo, $100 a day on Adsense If you need things cleared up, OP, or anyone else, feel free to PM me but its easier if you just post your questions here so I can help everyone.
Would you say Market Samurai is worth the cost or can equivalent research be done with adword's keyword tool and siteexplorer? BTW, thanks for the awesome post.
Really important and informative article shared by you. It will help many adsense publishers who have wish to earn more and more money through Google Adsense.