It’s organic traffic (i.e. traffic from Google and other search engines).
Here’s a simple example to illustrate the point. Suppose you have an online forum which receives 500,000 unique visitors per month, but 100% of those are coming directly to the forum, either by a bookmark or by typing the URL on their browsers, because they are already regular members. The second website is a niche site that receives only 250,000 unique visitors per month, but 80% of those are coming from search engines, while the remaining 20% are coming from referring sites. Despite the huge different in traffic levels, if both sites started using Google AdSense the niche, one would earn a lot more (I wouldn’t be surprised if it would be five or even ten times more).
How come?
That’s because visitors coming from search engines are already looking for something in specific (i.e. they are looking whatever they searched on Google) and when they end up on your site they are very likely to click on your AdSense units should they see something that is related to what they’re looking for. Other types tend to click on ads much less often (the ones that visit your site regularly even stop seeing your ads—it’s called ad blindness).
The bottom line is that if you want to increase your AdSense earnings, one of the best things you can do is to increase your organic traffic. That’s easier said than done, I know, but it’s totally possible, and below I want to to share a strategy you can use for this.
The long tail
The central idea of this strategy is to use the long tail to increase your organic traffic.If you are not familiar with the term, the long tail refers to the tail-shaped curve that is produced when you consider the distribution of certain things. For example, consider the books sold on Amazon.com. There are some books that end up selling millions of copies. Those are the best-sellers, and they are responsible for a big part of Amazon’s revenues. Nothing new here. What about the more obscure books that sell a much fewer number of copies (e.g., from 100 up to 1000). One could think they are negligible to Amazon’s business model, but quite the opposite! The sales volume from each of those books individually might be insignificant, but there are hundreds of thousands of such books, so if you combine their sales the result is quite significant (and some people argued that this is a key advantage for Amazon).
The same principle applies to many things online, including search queries on search engines. A small number of search queries (e.g. “money”, “health”, “business”) take the bulk of the resources on search engines. However, if you sum all the rare and obscure search queries (e.g. “how to make money selling pets”, “health therapy with dolphins”), their volume end up being significant. The image below illustrates this:
How can you use this principle to get more organic traffic? It’s simple: discover the long tail keywords related to your niche and create content to fill the needs of those users. Here’s a step-by-step guide for doing this:
Step 1: Use the double-filter process to find long tail keywords
You can do this step using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.Before getting started, on the Filter options make sure to select the locations as “all countries” and the language as “all languages” (after all you are aiming from global traffic). Also, on the left sidebar, change the type of match from “Broad” to “Exact” (this is to ensure the data will be more reliable).
Let’s suppose you have a blog about PC games. You should start with the broadest possible keyword, “PC games”. Now scroll through the results looking for narrower keywords that have at least 50,000 monthly searches. For instance, “pc games download”, “free games for pc” and “pc game list.” Write those on notepad. This is the first filter.
To filter the keywords one more time, pick each of the narrower terms you selected on the previous step and put the on Google’s tool. For instance, I’ll use “pc games download”, as you can see with the screenshot below:
Now you need to scroll through the results one more time, looking for very narrow (i.e. long tail) keywords that have between 1000 and 15000 monthly searches. Some examples I found are: “old pc games download”, “full pc games downloads”, “free pc games downloads for windows 7″, and “games download free full version”.
The longer the keyword the better (as long as it has at least 1000 monthly searches) because ranking for it will be easier.
Step 2: Create a piece of content filling the needs of those users
Google’s main business is search. This means that it needs to deliver results that will completely satisfy its users, else it will start losing money. Knowing this, the starting point for any promotional effort to increase your organic traffic should be the needs of the users you want to attract.In other words, if you want to receive traffic from the keyword “old pc games download” you must make sure that the page in your site that is supposed to rank well for that keyword has all the information, links and resources someone searching for that term could be looking for.
Now your goal is to create one page/blog post for each of the long tail keywords you found in the first step. You don’t need to do this all in the same day. Instead you could aim to publish a new one every week or so.
Just make sure that the content on that page will be complete and top notch (i.e., don’t be afraid to spend some hours researching and composing it).
Step 3: Promote those pages like you mean it
As you probably know, having great content is only part of the equation if you want to rank well in Google and receive organic traffic. The other part is promotion and backlinks.Here are some methods you can use to promote each of your pages/posts once you publish them:
- Email the URL of your page to bloggers in your niche saying they might find it interesting. And I don’t mean five or six of them. I mean email it to 100 bloggers and website owners. If you can’t find 100 in websites your niche, you aren’t trying hard enough.
- Guest post on other blogs and, instead of linking to your homepage on the byline, link to the page you are trying to promote. Again, I am not talking about one or two guest posts, but ten or 20 for each page you publish targeting a long tail keyword.
- Leverage social networks like Twitter and Facebook to promote the page, and perhaps create a contest to encourage people to share the page with their friends.
- Post about your page on online forums, Q and A sites, social bookmarking sites, you name it.
Step 4: Wait and profit
That’s pretty much it. After you do all of the above, you’ll just need to wait while your pages go up in the search rankings. Usually this take between four and eight weeks to happen. At this point you should start seeing an increase in the organic traffic, and consequently on your AdSense earnings.If it works as planned you can go back to Step 1 and repeat the process with other keywords or with other niches as well.
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