So, what do you write about to increase your readership and potential for adsense or advertising revenue? How do you write in order to create income with your local niche site?

One aspect that I looked at when I started my local niche site was since I lived near a large metro area (Cincinnati) was that I would be competing with all of the other media outlets. I knew that I didn’t have the time to be continually writing for the local niche site either.

One of the first things I did was to take local news stories that were either in the newspaper or on the television and then expand on them. This is a great way to bring more information about a certain topic to light and really help bring readers to your site. You can also gain popularity with other media outlets by being the know all resource of information. So how does this aspect work?

If your local media outlet writes about a new restaurant that is getting ready to open, expand on what types of food they will serve. Provide some information about what the food represents and about the country that it is from. You can also write about what used to be in that location too. Anything that you can write to expand upon the topic that isn’t covered by the other media outlets is key here. Put information in your articles that no one else does, or cares to provide.

Another key area that is overlooked is something that I have been experimenting with. Let’s say that you have a large storm come through the area. Oh, let’s say something like Hurricane Ike. One of the first things I did was to write about how the storm hit the Northern Kentucky area. I wrote about the damage that it caused and how local agencies were working to restore electric power and other services.

Now this was a good article as people were looking for information about when they were possibly going to be getting their electric restored. They were looking for information about services that they could use to get the trees removed, or have their roofs fixed…get the idea here?

Well, due to the overwhelming response that I got from the article, I wrote another couple that dealt specifically with roofing repair companies and the scams that always follow them during emergencies and storms. I also wrote another article about how to find a good tree service and what to make sure that they have in order to be qualified.

Guess what? Those were some of the highest adsense clicks that I have ever recorded! When people are looking for information and you give them the teaser info with a “link” that provides the goods, you are golden!

So, what does this translate into? Pretty simply if you run out of local news and stuff of interest to write, don’t dump your local niche blog. Keep it and start writing posts for adsense or other advertisements.

Know of some services in your town that people are looking for? Write about it. Offer advertisement space or referal links to other businesses and write about them. You never know what they might offer up for payment. Of course, you could always write for adsense ads. Using generic posts but customizing them for your local niche is working even more for me so far.

What do you think? Have you had any luck with local niche advertising or not?

This might not seem like a lot, but I have found a few PR4 pages of members there so far. You can also promote your own sites with article snippets they call “intel”, in which you can provide a link or two, “do followed” of course!

Pretty simple concept, and another easy way to get some backlinks coming to your sites. Here is the link to my site if you are interested in visiting Qassia.

Add some images to it! Visual cues and images related to that topic of your niche site can really help improve your site. It will also help to keep your visitors on site a little longer, thereby helping to maybe draw them into clicking an ad or affiliate link of yours.

So, where do you find images to use? Here are a few of my favorite spots to get them.

stock.xchng

Also known as Stock-xchange (or however you want to spell it) is a great place to get quality photos of a wide variety of topics. Registration is free and quick. One note of caution, you really need to read the disclosure on each picture before you use it. Some authors don’t have any restrictions, some want to be notified via email with the site address it is on, and others restrict it’s usage to non-commercial sites. There are lots more restrictions and other things you need to read.

Pay attention to the details with each photo to keep from getting in hot water.

morguefile.com

Another neat site, similar to Stock Exchange, just pay attention to any requests or restrictions on the photo’s by the owner and you should be fine.

Flickr

I haven’t used Flickr for photos yet, but Skellie at Skelliewag.org has written a great writeup on using Flickr photos for your site. Read A complete guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images for more great information, and check out her site. She is really a tremendous writer and offers tons of great advice for blogging topics.

Great list of resources

There are many great sites out there with photos that you can use. Just pay attention to the details so you won’t get in hot water if you are using a photo against the authors terms.

Here is a great resource site for more links to photo sites for free stock photos.

Let’s take a look at an example of a country I would love to visit someday, Ireland.

Searching for Ireland will give me way to many results to think about if I was going to visit. It would provide me a great place to start, don’t get me wrong, but most people already know what towns or cities they are wanting to visit when they begin researching a trip to another country.

So, let’s narrow it down a little more to Dublin, Ireland.

Now if I was wanting to visit Dublin, Ireland, I would like to know what are some must see places. Where would I find a good pint of Guiness? How is the weather in July? What is the crime rate and where should I not go after dark?

So doing a Google search for Dublin Ireland with no quotes shows me almost 3 million results. Since the average Google user doesn’t know to put quotes around a topic to narrow it down, let’s leave them out for now.

The first three are legit sites, the official tourism site, the wikepedia site and the official portal site for the city of Dublin. Now the rest of the sites also appear to be legit sites with a wide variety of purposes, such as the Dublin airport and US Embassy in Dublin.

Let’s narrow our search down some more. Dublin Ireland best restaurant.

Going to the first result on my Google page (your’s might be different) give’s me a PR 2 site. Easily beatable! Check out what they have on the page for Dublin Ireland Best Restaurant.

Basic simple information that you could easily gather yourself from other local sources, or visiting these places yourself and writing up your own review, or letting the business owner know that they can submit a write up themselves that you would be “willing” to place on your blog or site (for a small fee of course!).

If you take a look at the first page results again for Dublin Ireland Best Restaurant, you will see that the highest PR is a 4. Of course there is a PR 7 on their also, but that is the official Dublin site.

Now, what else could you post on your local niche blog for tourists, visitors or people looking to move there? How about weather data. You can easily get this from weather.com or the weatherchannel as a plugin for your site.

What about bars and social places? What about the single scene or retirement population? What about shopping places, such as the unique stores, not the big chain stores or other large places.

There are so many ideas of topics that you can post about, plus there are so many ways to monetize your local niche blog that it would be impossible to write about them all. Just use your imagination and think if you lived outside of your area and were looking to move there or just come for a visit, what are some things that you would want to know about.

One item I use to track my sites is the Google Webmaster Tools. This is a great and quick resource that will let you know when Google last indexed your site, what links are coming in and out of your site, and lots of other information.

But, one of my niche sites is using a pre-owned domain name. The problem I found was that the tracking code that the previous owners were using from the Google Webmaster tools was still showing up under “my” domain name.

What is the problem? Well, let’s confuse Google a little more and make them think we have several owners to the site. Since your Google Webmaster tools are registered to your email or account name, if there are several different tracking codes showing up under your newly purchased pre-owned domain name, Google will throw up all over your results and not index your site until this is cleared up.

This is just like when you go and it says that you need to reverify the correct code for your site.

Be sure to check the code and update any pre-owned domain names with this important code. It will help to prevent any problems with Google on pre-owned domain names.

When you are using Bookmarking Demon to create accounts and submit your sites, you must remember one crucial point with this software. You can be seen as spamming the bookmarking sites by the number of submissions that you are giving each site. Let’s take a look at a couple of tips for submitting safely to bookmarking sites.

One of the methods to get your accounts screwed quickly with any social bookmarking site is to submit numerous posts quickly, or to be submitting the same URL to multiple posts in rapid succession.

What the hell do I mean?

Let’s say you are submitting your “favorite dog leash” URL to your created accounts with Bookmarking Demon. You have submitted it on one BMD run so far. Now, you create a new set of accounts, and submit is again. Tag, you are screwed. This will raise the red flags that something is amiss and the sites will look further into what is going on, and will lead to getting your accounts deleted, and your IP address blocked from any further activity with that site.

So, how do you get around this?

Easily.

What other sites do you read or visit each day? Pick out a few, well more than a few, but make the ratio at least 50/50 mix with your niche sites and “real” sites. You want to spread the submissions out over a few days to week to make it seem more realistic.

You wouldn’t submit 50 links in two minutes on one real site if you were manually submitting them would you? Hell NO!

Just remember, Bookmarking Demon is a tool. If you manually submit the sites using something like SocialPoster.com, you will probably be ok. But a powerful tool like Bookmarking Demon needs to be treated with respect, or you will screw yourself and all that you are trying to accomplish.

Let’s take a quick look at what I think is going on, just from personal observation and SU experience.

The problem as I see it, and I have tried this out twice (much to my stupidity or curiosity) seems to be that when you submit your site to StumbleUpon, people click on the “Stumble” button and it takes them to a site. They generally will click away again on the “Stumble” button very quickly leaving you with a high bounce rate.

What does the high bounce rate have to do with my Adsense CTR?

Hey, thanks for asking! When your page is loaded and served to someone, it loads up your Adsense code and it counts as an impression. When you get lots of impressions, and low clicks, that is when your CTR begins to suffer, and thus your low income.

Those damn SU users!

Yep, I have done it. I use SU to browse around at times, and generally I won’t spend a lot of time checking out a site. I take a quick look and usually move on, either pressing the “vote up” or “vote down” thumb on my toolbar. This is what most SU users do. They usually don’t spend to much time really looking at the site, and they sure as hell don’t click ads!

So, the next time you are thinking about submitting your niche site with Adsense to StumbleUpon, maybe you should think twice.

So, what’s my point? Well, it seems like the local niche market is a good one. From just a few searches that I have done on potential niche markets in my area, there is some competition, but not lots.

What does this mean? There is no one more familiar with where you live than yourself. You know the town, the stores, the people who live around you and what is happening around your area. What is popular where you live? Is it the minor league baseball team? Or what about a manufacturing company that produces widgets for distribution around the world?

The point of this post is that you need to be looking locally for your niche market. Why not capitalize on what is going on around you and provide a site that you can draw visitors into. Just take a look at what Court is doing with his niche market case study. Pretty cool stuff!

So fire up your favorite keyword research tool and just start broad for your hometown name. Then you can see what people are searching for from there. Check out the competition and see what it looks like and then go after them and beat them with your niche site!

Advertising is a very important part of running any type of business. You need to advertise to reach new customers and market your products or services. Whether you run your business online or not you probably already realize how important it is to advertise but if you are running your business online you should understand there is a great deal of free advertising available in the form of optimal search engine rankings.

Well known search engines such as Google rank websites according to complex algorithms which are designed to determine which websites are most relevant for particular search terms. Therefore taking the time and effort to optimize your website for relevant search terms may result in you being rewarded with high search engine rankings for these terms. This is important because most Internet users rely heavily on these rankings. It is not uncommon for Internet users to only review the first few results when they search for a particular term. This means if your website ranks high enough to appear on the first page of the search results you will likely enjoy increased website traffic. However, if your website doesn’t make it to the first page or even the second page, it is unlikely you will receive a great deal of website traffic from visitors who use search engines.

Now that you understand why search engine rankings are so important you might wonder how to achieve these rankings. The easiest way to optimize your website is to hire a SEO specialist to do the work for you. The world of SEO is complex and continually evolving making it difficult for most business owners who do not specialize in SEO to keep up with the changes in the industry. Therefore, business owners who attempt to optimize their website by themselves may have difficulty keeping up with competitors who hire a SEO consultant to optimize their website.

The algorithms used by search engines can be rather complex and include a number of different factors. Some of the common factors in the equation include keyword density, META tags, titles, inbound links, website traffic and content.

Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular keyword is used in the content of your website. The theory behind this concept is that website which use a keyword often are likely extremely relevant to that keyword, however, overuse of that keyword may result in penalties to the website if the search engine deemed the keywords are not being used appropriately.

META tags are pieces of HTML code which some search engines use in evaluating the content of a website. Placing keywords in these tags can be beneficial in some search engines. However, care should be taken to avoid placing irrelevant keywords in these tags as this may result in your website being penalized.

Inbound links are also used by some search engines to rank websites. Inbound links refer to links on other websites which point to your website. In evaluating the worth of these inbound links, some search engines consider the rank of the website providing the link to your website. This means you should ensure the website providing inbound links to your website are high ranking websites to receive the most benefit from these links.

Finally, the content on your website can do a great deal to bolster your search engine rankings. Most SEO firms retain a staff of writers who are skilled at providing quality content which is also optimized for relevant keywords. If you hire a SEO firm who does not providing copywriting services you should invest in hiring a professional writer yourself. This will help to ensure the copy on your website is not only valuable to your visitors but also considered valuable to search engines.

Your niche marketing campaign will benefit from effective SEO properties.  Be sure to check your templates, and use SEO tools to verify and monitor your niche marketing campaign effectiveness.