I am about to embark on a new website project which is concerned about the latest up to date news about a very popular football (soccer) club. I did a google keyword research on (XXX news) and 33,000 global monthly searches popped up (search preference was on exact).
From your experience, how profitable is such an industry? How profitable will it be with Adsense as compared to CPM campaigns?
P.S: I write very original up to date content on a day to day basis (multiple times a day), which my viewers absolutely LOVED. (I previously embarked on such a website for up to 6 months were I started getting around 4000 uniques a day, but had to kill the project off due to reasons outside my control. But now I want to reembark on it).
[FONT=verdana]Nobody can tell you how profitable your project is likely to be, not whether AdSense will be better for you than any other type of advertising. The fact that you saw 33,000 searches for a particular search term tells you nothing. There’s no way to deduce from that how well your site will rank for that term. Even it it ranks well, we don’t know how much traffic that will generate, nor how many of your visitors will click on your ads.
What I’m saying is that there simply is not enough information to answer your question.
Personally, I would be cautious about launching any new venture these days that relies on Google to deliver traffic. There are simply too many factors - many of which are outside your control - to be sure of its success.
In sports niche the cpc is very very low, so until and unless you get lot of visitors say 10000-20000 per month unique visitor you will not see $$$ into your account. so first check the cpc of the keyword. Also these are seasonal keywords so be cautious.
Traffic is not an issue I suppose due to the fact that this website is about one of my passions in life and second of all is that I was really growing fast when I started (4000 uniques a day 6 months after starting the website previously before discontinuing it due to reasons outside my control).
What would you say if I were to go with CPM as opposed to adsense since this specific niche is low paying in terms of CPC? With writing about 5-6 quality up to date news articles a day I can generate a whole lot of pageviews with say 4000 uniques a day.
First, CPM is not an alternative to AdSense. AdSense delivers both CPM and CPC (although it’s mainly CPC), as do many other ad platforms.
More importantly, you don’t have to make the decision up front. The great advantage of this business is that it’s easy to test. You should put AdSense on maybe half your pages, and some other sort of advertising on the other half, and compare the results. And while you’re at it, test for different ad placements, banners vs text, and so on. That will give you much better information than you’ll get from a forum discussion.
I would add that if you really manage to write five or six high-quality up-to-date news stories per day, you have a good chance of success. You will develop a lot of content very quickly, which is what you need. If you do a good job of it, you will also build up a regular audience. But you will be working very hard, and it’s not clear if you will find that much to say about one particular football club, however popular and news-worthy they are. It’s your decision whether you want to take a chance on it.
Never really thought about monetizing it back then nor had the chance to plan for such a thing to be honest.
Thank you for the advice, I appreciate it. I’ll take it into action as soon as I start the website, and I’ll experiment around with things and see how it goes
The number of searchs by itself doesn’t help much. When you do a search (broad or not) you also need to see the number of sites that include that term. So while in adwords Google may say that there is 33,000 searches per month (which is quite low), if you go to Google itself and search for that term, it will say tell you “aprox 4,000,000 results in 0,29 sec”
This figure will tell you how much competition you’ll have. So 33,000/4,000,000=0.00825. This means that if traffic was spread evenly (and in case the these searches were all real, not misspellings or people looking for something else but that confused the term, etc), each page would only get a 0.8 %. Which such a low figure, making a site like this profitable will be hard, had work.
As @Mikl; said, there are many factors that may do a site profitable and this information is just one more indicator, nothing else. Should it be taken into account? Sure. How reliable it is? Not much but it may indicate you how hard would be to get organic traffic and that if you want to sell something you may want to rely on offline advertising or CPC or radio ads.
