Highest-Priced Keywords for Newbies

[indianboy]

I keep saying there's lots of ways to skin the AdSense cat, but every time a newbie arrives asking where the high-paying keywords are, I immediately think that ain't one of 'em.
Is it possible to drive a stake in that question? Probably not, but let's have a go. Here are some problems that come to mind.


You're asking where the money is on one of the biggest AdSense forums around. This is like joining a real estate firm and saying "I would like the multi-million dollar homes to sell, please." It's like going to Exxon and saying "Hey, I'm just starting out in the oil business -- can you tell me where the best places to drill are?" If nothing else, it shows a kind of naivete about human beings that does not bode well for success in any kind of business.

You're waving a red flag to the shysters. You might as well drive to Las Vegas and wander around shouting "I'm just learning how to play poker because I've heard there's big money in it -- can someone find me a poker game?" Oh yes, my friend, you will definitely find a poker game where you will be welcomed with open arms -- so long as your wallet still has money. Let me help you out, poor newbie, with my own custom list of high-paying keywords, which I will only charge you a nominal fee for. If those don't work out, then I have some more I can sell you. I may have some other tools and services I can sell you, conveniently priced at... whatever you can afford.

You need traffic to make money. OK, so someone in a giant AdSense forum publicly points you to keyword X. First, keyword X was probably widely known to pay good money and, if not, then it sure is now. So it's guaranteed that people with more experience, speed, and resources than you will be competing to rank for keyword X and related terms. So, you ain't gonna get free search engine (SE) traffic for keyword X -- how will you get traffic?

MFA's swarm like flies at your high-paying keyword picnic. Let's say you do rank for high-paying keyword X and start raking in the cash. Cool, well, I'm too lazy to compete against you for actual rankings, so I'll just make a Made For Adsense (MFA) website that has the crappiest text in the world, surrounded by nothing but the same ads you're making money from. Then I'll use AdWords accounts to buy ads targetting keyword X on your website. You'll get flooded with ads that bring people to my website, where I'll get enough clicks to pay for my AdWords campaign plus a small profit.

Buy high, sell low! Asking where the high-paying keywords is is a way of finding where the good money used to be. If everybody knows the CPC is high, then lots of people have already jumped on it. If you absolutely, positively must focus on high CPC (instead of lots of modest CPC keywords that you personally are uniquely qualified to get traffic for), then at least try to focus on what's going to be high-paying tomorrow, not on what's high-paying today. You want to buy Google stock before it peaks, not just before it tanks.

You need ad inventory. Sometimes the very reason that keyword X is high-paying is that there's little ad inventory for it. Suppose I make custom, roboticized homes and discover that I can make a profit by buying ads at $100/click. So you target "robot homes", spend months gettin your website up, ranking for all the relevant terms, etc. You're real smart, so before long you have a month where you send me 10 clicks. Woo-hoo, you're making $1,000/month already! Oooops! Turns out I can only make 3 homes per year, and I got my 3 orders out of your 10 clicks and I'm done with AdWords for the year, so now you're sitting there with your robot home website wondering why it used to pay well and doesn't anymore.

All eggs in one basket. Very often, the newbie search for high-paying keywords is immediately followed by the quest to rank highly with Google for one or two keywords. Relying on free search engine traffic for one or two keywords as a business model is nuts. Google for "google update" here and read the mounds of posts by people moaning that the latest algorithm tweak has "wiped out" their business. That could be you, working a year to get to the top of the heap for keyword X, starting to make money, only to find that the slightest algorithm wind shift blows you off the mountain.

High-paying for who? If I tell you that I'm getting $1/click for keyword X, does that really help you? Smart Pricing means that Google is free to pay you $.01/click for the exact same ad they pay me $1 for.

Does the price per click ever enter into a sane AdSense business plan? Of course. After you think about what topics you can create content for, and whether you can get reasonable traffic for them, and whether very many different companies are buying ads that would display for that content, and... all that stuff. It sure makes sense when deciding which of two topics to go after to see which might be paying more per click (even though that's no guarantee of what you'll get).

There's two basic tools. The free Overture bids tool lets you enter a keyword and see what (they claim) people are bidding for that keyword. AdWords has a free tool that also claims to offer some keyword pricing information. Google for "keyword selector tool" to find both of them.

For figuring out how much money you'll make, these tools are pretty