How to evaluate topic ideas
So you got an idea for a blog or a blog post. If you want to blog for money you might then want to see if the idea in question has the potential to make you money. Before I go in to that and how to evaluate the economic potential of an article/blog idea I want to stress that the money making on every single article never can be the main focus if you want to create a high quality authority blog. To do this you will need to provide some information that your guest will want to see on your site even if it is unlikely to earn you much money. You will in other words need to balance between providing what is expected of a quality site and posting content that is likely to earn you a lot of money. If you want a long term authority blog that make you money than providing the info that is expected is more important than posting information that will make you money. If you want to earn money quickly but do not care that much about staying power you should focus mainly on the articles potential of earning you money and less on providing the information the visitor will expect.
Okay lets back to how you evaluate your ideas. This article will assume that you use Adsense or similar to monetize your blog. CPA can usually earn you more money but if you know how to evaluate for adsense you will know how to evaluate for CPA as well. Just just have to consider the conversion rate of the cpa offer instead of the CPC in that case.
The profitability of an idea, an article, a keyword boils down to 3 different factors.
- Potential visitors/readers
- CPC / Conversion
- Competition
Potential readers and competition are closely interlinked but not the same. Potential visitors tells you how many visitors you could expect to get if you get to the top of Google and other search engines for the topic in question. Competition gives information about how hard it would be to get to the top. You need to look at both and combine them to get a good idea about how valuable a term is. A term that has very high competition and a lot of potential visitors might not be worth anything as you might not be able to to rank high enough to get any traffic from it. You hence want a term with a high number of potential visitors and a low competition. The term should also ideally have a high CPC. How high it needs to be to make a term profitable depends on the number of potential visitors it can bring. Generally speaking you want a cpc of at least USD 1 and 1000 potential visitors a month for it to be worth building a blog about the topic. A single article can be written on topics with a lot less potential visitors.
Finding out the potential visitors is easy. Simply go to adwords keywords tool and perform a search for the keyword you are thinking about. Always search for the words in brackets to get information about how many people are looking for that exact term. Leaving out the brackets can give very misleading information. Adwords tools will also give you an idea of the CPC advertisers pay to get featured in association with certain keywords.
To find out the competition, simply search for the term in google. If the term is dominated by high Pr pages and well optimized exact match domains with strong link profiles you should usually stay away from the topic. If the top pages are low PR sites that do not target the exact phrase within the title tag or prominently on the site you have found a good keyword.
This was just a very basic introduction to evaluating keywords. As your get more experienced you will learn to look at more and more factors to choose better and better topics for your blogs, sites and articles.