Oh shit a business thread!
I see a lot of people asking about mainstream around here so I wanted to throw this simple idea out there for everyone, trolls and all. I'm sure some of you are familiar with this, if so this thread is not for you.
AdSense - How Everyone Is Doing It
Everyone knows what AdSense is by now and almost everyone has tried to make money with it at one point or another. Unfortunately, most people come away thinking that it's just something you throw on your personal blog or use to monetize some shitty free video game site you made as a hobby. Those $0.03 clicks with a bad ratio are depressing. While using AdSense in this manner is fine and dandy for the people that run sites for free it's worthless to a webmaster without millions of hits.
When used in this manner you are letting Google pick the ads that fit your content.
AdSense - A Better Way
As a webmaster, a better way to make money from AdSense is to create content to fit the ads
you want on your site. Obviously you want something that pays more than a few cents per click but allows you to generate enough traffic to justify your efforts.
One simple way to do this is to cater to surfers looking for a specific type of product. You want to find a product type that has a decent retail price and is popular enough overall to generate enough search traffic to make your efforts worthwhile. The reason for this is that the large companies that are competing to sell these products can afford to pay Google more per click than someone offering free games can. Because mainstream is so amazingly huge there are literally millions of products that fall into this category and I'll give you an example below.
Designer Shoes
I just pulled this example out of my ass but it should be as good as any other. The items that fall under this category have a high retail price which means more money per click on your AdWords units. Also, those that can afford the products aren't the only ones looking them up. For instance, Paris Hilton might be seen on the red carpet sporting a pair of designer shoes of a certain brand and style. Since those reporting on celebrities like to point this kind of stuff out the name brand and style of shoes is often mentioned and sometimes they are even asked about them in their interview. This leads to women of all ages looking them up to see if they could ever afford them or just to gawk.
That's Where You Come In
For this niche you would want to put up a website covering designer shoes to capitalize on these high PPC ads. The easiest way to do this and optimize for search engines without any additional effort is to use WordPress. By making only a few posts per day you can start the ball rolling on taking over the search engines for your niche.
Unlike adult and other highly competitive industries there are hardly any websites (comparatively) competing for traffic on such products and even those that do usually have such shitty code that their pages are as unoptimized as you can get.
Let's take a look at a random designer shoe offering from Amazon.
Casadei Womens Triple Platform Pump
http://www.amazon.com/Casadei-Womens...N%3DB002C19TJ8
As you can see from the link, these shoes retail for up to $650.
Great! Now let's take a look at a few of the search phrases one might use to look for these shoes in Google and how many results come up.
Casadei Platform Pumps - 35,600 results
Casadei Triple Platform Pump - 8,290 results
Casadei Triple Platform - 29,700 results
Now, I'm no expert on SEO but I and every other idiot on the planet could successfully optimize a post to land on the front page for these phrases in short order. You may think that it's impossible to topple someone like Amazon but that couldn't be further from the truth. If your site is all about designer shoes Google will eventually (usually) give your website more relevance than one selling everything under the sun. Also, with some basic SEO skills you can optimize a blog (think tags and categories) to cover all of your desired search phrases easily. I've shot to number one on much more competitive terms in 1 - 3 weeks with good content.
And Look Who's Buying!
If you look at the AdSense ads on the side of the page you'll see names like Neiman Marcus in there. On a style of shoe that can cost as much as $700 I assure you they aren't paying 5 cents per click. There are also plenty of ads running so you know it's competitive enough to be well over the minimum bid. I wouldn't be surprised to see $1 clicks on a regular basis if this were my niche.
Important Details
* Putting up a blog full of images and titles of the product is not going to work so great. You will actually have to take the time to understand enough about your niche to make some decent posts on the topic at hand. The more personal you can be in your writing the better. Also, if you have a product that allows you to incorporate more common search terms then do so often. Using the Paris Hilton reference above, if you made a post about Paris Hilton wearing these Casadei Triple Platform pumps then you have more long tail searches possible but also have a chance at getting some Paris Hilton traffic. Because your site is mainly about shoes the more valuable ads will still display in most cases.
* No one post is going to bring you 100,000 hits or even 1,000 in most cases. The purpose of these type of sites is to land in the top positions on search engines for specific products. This makes you 100% relevant to those that do search for the items and also means that a huge percentage of your visitors click through to check prices on the items, look at other styles, etc. Each day you post just ads to your search engine arsenal. What's good about writing about specific products is that they are relevant as long as the product exists. Even if you don't update for a few weeks your post on a specific product is still 100% relevant and always will be.
Tips For The Future
Designer shoes is a fairly sticky topic. What women love more than buying shoes is showing them off and talking about them. Once your traffic justifies it you can add a forum, well sectioned off by brands etc, for members to show off their shoes, sell their unwanted shoes etc. Now you have users generating 100% relevant content for you 7 days a week. This is not always viable depending on the products you choose but for designer shoes it would be perfect.
And That's How You Make Content To Fit The Ads To Make More Money.
Tips are accepted, have a nice day.
