Finding In-Demand & Profitable Topics

[Matthew Sherborne]

Finding In-Demand & Profitable Topics

You can write about anything that pleases you, but you might as well get paid the most for your time that you possibly can. For this reason you need to determine two things before you can decide if a topic will be profitable.

• Topic Popularity
• Topic Value

Topic popularity is just that, how popular the topic is on the web. Now you’ll remember, I just said you can write about anything your heart desires, and that’s true. The drawback to writing about anything you can think of is there may be a huge demand, no demand, or somewhere in between. We want a topic with a good to huge demand. One way to find out if a topic has demand is to do a search on our topic keyword. Here’s a link to the Overture search tool. Keyword Selector Tool In the screenshot below, I’ve done a search on a keyword I’m knowledgeable about and that interests me, Poker.




Well, I’d say the number of search results looks promising. 250,000 searches on Yahoo’s Overture in one month should dispel any idea of the topic not being popular. Just to cover all of the bases I’m going to enter the same keyword into another popular Overture keyword search tool. Free Keyword Suggestion Tool (Wordtracker Suggestion Tool & Overture Bid Tool Combined) & Keyword Generator Here are the results below. Yep, it looks like I’ve found a popular topic all right. Almost 8,450 daily searches on Yahoo’s Overture and over 4,500 daily searches on Wordtracker, a popular keyword search tool.



Yahoo’s Overture is not famous for their precision and only have an approximate search engine market share of around 10 to 20%. With Google receiving the lion’s share of search engine traffic it only makes sense to see what they have to say. So, to play it safe I’m going to use the Google Adwords keyword tool to see how our keyword topic rates. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

[Matthew Sherborne]

I’ve entered ‘poker’ in the search box and the resulting page displays related keywords by their relevance to my search term.

You can see in the screenshot below, the current search volume looks good with the green status bar about 65% full. This means it’s a fairly trafficked search term.





What’s really interesting is the green bar that represents advertiser competition. It’s maxed out and fully green, meaning this search term has strong advertiser competition and therefore probably a valuable keyword. Now If you remember earlier I stated that, Topic Popularity and Topic Value make a profitable topic choice. So now that we’ve got a popular topic pick, here’s how we see if it has Topic Value. To determine if a topic has value I use the keyword bidding tool at:



www.Spyfu.com

Spyfu is my secret weapon for determining many important factors concerning topic selection. It’s easy to use and works just like a keyword search engine to tell you which keywords are currently the most valuable to website owners who advertise using Google Adwords. To get started with Spyfu and find important keyword bid data, enter a topic keyword in the search box. You’ll then get results like the average keyword bidding price, relevant bid on keywords, top Adwords results and what keywords competitors are buying. In the screenshot below are the results from entering my topic keyword, ‘poker,’ into the search box. You can see that the tool estimates that website advertisers pay $0.60 cents per click. These ads are found in the sponsored results of a Google search for that keyword.



Knowing how much advertisers are paying for a keyword gives you a good idea of the value of your topic. For instance the $0.60 cents per click displayed above is a better than average click rate. A low click rate would be $0.10 cents or less, if you find one that is $0.75 cents or higher it’s a high value keyword. High value keywords are great as long as they are also popular. Another thing to consider is the amount of advertisers. You can see in the picture below that 20 advertisers are currently paying for the keyword in question.





The reason advertisers are paying so much per click to get their website noticed from the Google search engine results is because of the amount of website competition.

In the ‘Search Results’ above, you can see there are 123 million results for that keyword. A strong keyword will usually have several million search results, unless it’s a new concept or phrase.

A high number of search results means that there is high number of competing websites for that keyword, which also means the keyword topic may be a good candidate for use.

The reason for this is, sites that are in heavy competition will want new and unique content that you have to offer.

‘Clicks/Day’ shows you the number of people clicking on that keyword every day. At over 2,500 estimated sponsored clicks each day and an estimated cost per day to use that keyword of $1,500 it looks like a favorable topic to cover.

To recap, a strong topic is one that has both popularity and value. In this case, my example keyword, ‘poker,’ is a winner for me. It’s something I enjoy, it’s popular, and website advertisers are willing to pay $1,568.47 to be seen in the top sponsored search results for this keyword for a single day.

[Matthew Sherborne]

Find Your Profitable Topics

Now that you’ve compiled your list, narrow down your topics to three areas of expertise. The reason for focusing in on only three topics is because you want to specialize to make more money in the long run.

Specializing in content creation serves several purposes.

The first reason is you want to become known as an expert in a particular field. Experts get paid more, garner trust, build credibility online and are the first in people’s mind when they have a problem. Setting yourself up as an expert by creating content in your area of expertise sets you up to succeed.

The second reason is, later you will compile reports about the topics you’ve chosen. These reports can be made from the content you have created and repackaged and sold for big money.

Writing about three topics only will enable you to have the related material you will need to create a report that you can sell and profit from. Whether it’s coin collecting, playing tennis or a love for diamond jewelry, you want to narrow down your topic selections to only three topics that are popular, valuable and most importantly, interest you.

Use the keyword tools in the ‘Finding In-Demand & Profitable Topics’ chapter to determine popularity and value of your topic selections.

Select the three topics that are popular, valuable and the most interesting to you. These will be the topics you will write about for the immediate future.



Now, Let create a content portfolio...

[andrew wee]

I like checking google news (news.google.com) and google trends (trends.google.com) as well as the top keywords on technorati (technorati.com) too.

You get a lot of ideas and can start pumping out content for cash really quick!