When creating web content, you can write about anything you want, however It’s well worth your time and effort to find in demand and profitable topics to write about. After all it takes the same amount of time to produce content that’s unpopular as it does to create content that’s highly searched for, sought after, and has high paying affiliate products.

For that reason alone it’s important to spend a little time planning out your internet marketing strategy before you choose a topic to promote.

To pick a hot and profitable market you need to determine two things before you can decide if a topic will be profitable.

1. Topic Popularity
2. Topic Value

Topic popularity is just that, how popular the topic is on the web.

Now you’ll remember, I just said you can write about anything your heart desires, and that’s true. The drawback to writing about anything you can think of is there may be a huge demand, no demand, or somewhere in between.

We want a topic with a good to huge demand. One way to find out if a topic has demand is to do a search on our topic keyword.

Google get the lion’s share of search engine traffic, so it only makes sense to see what they have to say. So, to play it safe I’m going to use the Google Adwords keyword tool to see how our keyword topic rates.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I’ve entered ‘poker’ in the search box and the resulting page displays related keywords by their relevance to my search term.

You can see in the screenshot below, the current search volume looks good with the green status bar about 65% full. This means it’s a fairly trafficked search term.

What’s really interesting is the green bar that represents advertiser competition. It’s maxed out and fully green, meaning this search term has strong advertiser competition and therefore probably a valuable keyword.

Now If you remember earlier I stated that, Topic Popularity and Topic Value make a profitable topic choice. So now that we’ve got a popular topic pick, here’s how we see if it has Topic Value.

To determine if a topic has value I use the keyword bidding tool at:

http://www.Spyfu.com

Spyfu is my secret weapon for determining many important factors concerning topic selection. It’s easy to use and works just like a keyword search engine to tell you which keywords are currently the most valuable to website owners who advertise using Google Adwords.

To get started with Spyfu and find important keyword bid data, enter a topic keyword in the search box. You’ll then get results like the average keyword bidding price, relevant bid on keywords, top Adwords results and what keywords competitors are buying.

In the screenshot below are the results from entering my topic keyword, ‘poker,’ into the search box.

You can see that the tool estimates that website advertisers pay $0.60 cents per click. These ads are found in the sponsored results of a Google search for that keyword.

Knowing how much advertisers are paying for a keyword gives you a good idea of the value of your topic. For instance the $0.60 cents per click displayed above is a better than average click rate.

A low click rate would be $0.10 cents or less, if you find one that is $0.75 cents or higher it’s a high value keyword. High value keywords are great as long as they are also popular.

Another thing to consider is the amount of advertisers. You can see in the picture below that 20 advertisers are currently paying for the keyword in question.

The reason advertisers are paying so much per click to get their website noticed from the Google search engine results is because of the amount of website competition.

In the ‘Search Results’ above, you can see there are 123 million results for that keyword. A strong keyword will usually have several million search results, unless it’s a new concept or phrase.

A high number of search results means that there is high number of competing websites for that keyword, which also means the keyword topic may be a good candidate for use.

The reason for this is, sites that are in heavy competition will want new and unique content that you have to offer.

‘Clicks/Day’ shows you the number of people clicking on that keyword every day. At over 2,500 estimated sponsored clicks each day and an estimated cost per day to use that keyword of $1,500 it looks like a favorable topic to cover.

To recap, a strong topic is one that has both popularity and value. In this case, my example keyword, ‘poker,’ is a winner for me. It’s something I enjoy, it’s popular, and website advertisers are willing to pay $1,568.47 to be seen in the top sponsored search results for this keyword for a single day.

For more information about finding topics that are hot and profitable take a look at some previous posts. Target longtail niche topics with the post, finding longtail keywords for your website. For some of the best sources for niche topics take a look at this post.