Update Sept 6th, 2010
XFactor just posted that he is considering reopening the forum with new terms. He really didn’t have to do that, but as always, he is going the extra mile with his service.

Who would’ve thought this day would come? I’m really saddened by this. XFactor‘s private forum was one of the only few forums with real information for Adsense publishers. That was the only forum I visited every single day religiously, and now it’s gone because of some random jerk :(

The forum is permanently closed due to a legal issue I have been dragged into between a 3rd party seller and a 3rd party buyer of several websites that were advertised on this forum. Between this and many other member problems behind the scenes since the forum opened a year ago, it has totally soured my enthusiasm to continue a discussion group in any fashion from this point on. It essentially boils down to one member of the forum who paid another member thousands of dollars for some websites. The buyer never received his websites and went on a severe rampage on me personally, because he claimed since it was ‘my forum’ then I should be responsible. He then got a lawyer with a cease and desist involved, and its just too much stress for me to handle. This has become a very disheartening situation because the forum was designed to help people, not create personal liabilities due to the actions of others.

I don’t know where to find back those wonderful members of the private forum. I wish we had an alternative forum for XFactor’s Adsense Masters Course members.

As promised, I will share with you a case study which explains why choosing a high-paying keyword is still important when it comes to Adsense. In my last post, I explained how a 1 page website generated thousands of dollars for me with small traffic. Not only that, but it also generated one of the highest paying clicks I’ve ever seen in my entire IM career. As you can see on the bottom of my previous post, it also generated $20 clicks. That’s how it was able to produce so much money with little traffic.

Today, I want to show a website that brings in about 14,000 unique visitors every month with 180,000 page views a month. I can’t really tell you the URL, but here is a screen shot of Awstats to prove my point.

As you can see from the stats, that site is doing great in terms of traffic. But when it comes to Adsense earnings, it’s doing about $0.10-0.15 per click whereas my high-paying keyword niche site pays ten times as much per click. If anyone wants to make a living off of Adsense sites, integrating high-paying keywords would be a “must” for success.

So what did I do to maximize the revenue from my site that generates over 14,000 uniques?

In order to get more out of the traffic I get, I started building an email list. Once people sign-up for my newsletter, they get automated emails from me with affiliate links embedded. Sometimes, I give out link to my own site where the article page is optimized with high-paying keywords. Whenever I send out these emails, I get big boost on Adsense earnings on that day. This is one strategy that works all the time.

To do this, I just find a best article I can find on that subject from an article directory. Then I create a single webpage with 2 Adsense blocks integrated. That webpage has no other links. It works great. Right now, about 100-150 people sign-up for my newsletter every single day.

Conclusion

The ideal way to approach niche marketing is to find keywords that pays well and have low competition at the same time. But when you find a niche keyword that pays low, and yet has extreme low competition, you can always build a list and redirect your traffic to a webpage that is optimized with high-paying keywords.

In this post, I want to prove my point that micro-niche sites still do work and it is still a great way to make money online. Since I started building micro-niche websites, I saw people arguing back and forth whether micro-niche sites are dead or not. I really didn’t care about what people think. I just kept on building my sites as I used to when I started.

To prove my point, I’d like to share a story. Back in December of 2008, I’ve created a single page, a 54 word post website. I can’t really reveal what I wrote there, but the post was about a health condition of morbidly obese people. It is a extremely saturated market with high PR websites dominating all related search terms. After reviewing keywords, I found a few keywords that had few hundred searches done each day with low competition.

After researching those two keywords, I dropped one that had almost no advertisers in Adsense. So I used the other keyword and came up with a simple, 54 word post about that health condition. Exactly a month later, I had a $84.47 Adsense day from this website. There was a big spike in traffic. Since then, it has generated $2389.36 in 2009. The funny thing is that that website has no back-link at all. It is not linked from any websites, even now.

You may think what’s the big deal about making $2389.36 with a website, and I understand where you are coming from. I’m just trying to tell you that a well-researched keyword combined with high paying ads can still make you money even in highly saturated markets. That’s the beauty of niche marketing, which I love.

Here is what I did to make this website.
1) Domain name is “keyword-keyword-keyword-tips.com” It is a three word keyword.
2) Registered the domain for 3 years.
3) I installed WordPress. I meant to post more on this website, but ended up doing only 1 post.
4) Since then, it has over 80 comments. I think the comments really helped boost search engine rankings. But I didn’t have any comments for many months.
5) It has 1 block of Adsense on the top. I will attach a screen shot.

That’s about it. If you are thinking about giving up with niche marketing, give it a second thought. Focus on keyword research and delivering the right content for that keyword. It has always worked and still working. In the future post, I will explain why choosing a high paying keyword is very important by showing you one of my sites that generates thousands visitors more per month then above site and making 1/10th of income from Adsense. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Here is a bonus screen shot. :)