Remember when I told you how people usually choose Google as their target search engine? It sounds like a good idea, since Google is —the“ major player in the field right now. I used to be a Google slave too but soon realized that it was much easier for me to have my sites rank high on MSN and Yahoo without putting in a lot of leg work.

And the good news is that once my sites were highly ranked in one or both of these engines, my rankings on Google naturally got better.

You see, when your website is on the first pages of a smaller engine for a popular keyword, people who build directory-style sites will most likely pick up your pages. This means easy backlinks to your sites, and more chances for you to rank higher on Google where offsite factors (such as backlinks) play a bigger role.

Today, instead of building a site with the purpose of ranking high in MSN and waiting for Google to pick up too, I carefully chose niche markets where my chances of getting top positions in all three engines are high.

The next step of my niche finding system involves getting more data we will use to eliminate bad niches from our previously created list.

So roll up your sleeves and let‘s get back to work.

First, we must know how many sites appear on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for each of the 100 keywords of our sub-niches list. To do this, simply go to www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.msn.com and enter each keyword enclosed in quotes as your search term and hit enter*. On the top of each page, you will see references to the number of results containing the keyword. Add this data in a 3rd, 4th and 5th columns of your spreadsheet.

While you're grabbing the number of results in Google for your key phrases, also count the number of Google Adwords™ ads that appear on the right side for each of your key phrases and enter it in another column. The next chapter will explain why. Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

There are queries more advanced than —keyword“ (keyword in quotes) and we will discuss them in the Appendix.

Are Advertiser Willing To Pay for Traffic?

The number of Adwords™ ads for any given key phrase is a good indicator of the marketability of the topic. A high number of ads usually means, for Adsense™ publishers, that it‘s a higher paying niche. The formula that illustrates this is very simple:

More Adwords™ ads for a key phrase
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More competition for the advertisers who want to bid on this key phrase
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Higher prices for each click

If advertisers are fighting for the best Adwords™ positions for a key phrase, this clearly tells us there is money in this market. Remember, advertisers pay Google for each click through their site. If they are willing to spend money, it‘s because they plan to make money. You see, even if your site on —blue widgets“ gets thousands of visitors each day, if there are no advertisers paying to use AdWords™, you can bet your shirt you won‘t get any AdSense™ income.

I hope you grabbed the number of AdWords™ ads for each of your key phrases as we will need this data soon.