Pixelrage.net

A favorite of mine are all of the internet marketing newbies who gloat over this year’s list of the top 50 or 100 highest paying AdSense keywords. Anyone in their right mind would know that there’s an obvious catch to this list, and that none of us would ever actually receive $50 for one click in our lifetime. So…what’s this list all about, anyway?

One of the best stories I can tell about this relates to a past job of mine. All I can say is that it was in a niche legal field, and I was managing the company’s AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts. Our prized two-word keyword had an astronomical price tag – we had set a bid of $20.00 for this particular keyword in order to appear within position 1-2 for it on Google search.

The problem with this company’s niche is that it was so brand new, that there litereally weren’t any relevant long-tail terms for it yet, making this a truly unique situation. We had also tried the Google Content Network (which includes all of the regular people like you and me who have AdSense on their website), which wound up being a complete waste of money. The bids for these keywords were far less expensive, but the conversion rate was horrible (keep this sentence in mind).

There were, in fact, times when we paid well over $10 for a single click. However, this only happened for ads that appeared on Google.com, where multiple pages of competing AdWords ads appeared for this two-word keyword. Ads on the content network barely reached heights that went beyond pocket change.

Why do companies pay so much per click? It’s a principle of ROI: pay $15 per click to get a client who will net $25,000 for a single service in a micro-niche market, and the benefit is obvious.

Skip ahead several months. The company sold out, I found another job, and had a great idea – why not take all of that knowlege of the business, as well as my knowledge of the niche’s keywords, and create my own site?

At the time, that two-word keyword’s plural version was available as a .com, as well as a “reversed” version (i.e., if the term was “legal training,” I was able to get traininglegal.com – in my case, the reversed term was also a valid keyword that had an ample amount of searches). I used these to create a mini-site with about ten 500-word articles about the niche, SEO’ed the site, put AdSense in the sweet spots, and started getting backlinks from a variety of sources, including one professor who ran an .edu, who was nice enough to give me a backlink directly from his site’s front page (and wow, did that make a difference).

As of now, I’m #1 on page 2 of Google for this two-word keyword and its reversed version. I’ve even beat out my old company and all of their competitors (one of my favorite strategies is to compete with big corporations who still don’t know what SEO is). It was truly one of the crowning achievements in my at-home SEO career! Regardless of these successes, my clicks typically ranged in the $0.15-$0.40 range. Occasionally, I’d get a $1.50 click, although it would be once a week or every two weeks. Given the fact that I *know* this term warranted a very high bid, I was disappointed to see how actual search network clicks were so low, even though my site was almost on page 1 of Google for a very difficult term that is dominated by .gov sites. In fact, I’m convinced that it is impossible to rank within the top three on Google page 1 for this keyword, as three .gov’s are cemented there and don’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

My personal opinion is that those infamous “highest paying AdSense keyword” lists are nothing more than price lists for the Google Search Network, or, the ads that appear on Google.com and other Google services. They have nothing to do with the Google Content Network (ads that appear within AdSense on webmaster blogs/sites). The dream is over for all of those who had their hopes up, and their time spent on debt consolidation, auto insurance and mesothelioma blogs.

I’m still an advocate of one thing, however. Getting your site to Google page 1 for a search term and advocating an “advertise” section that explains Google placed ads is your key to success. Most people don’t know this, but companies can place their ad on a specific site and within a specific position (skyscraper, sidebar, box, etc.) on your AdSense spots though AdWords. Google even made a tool so that companies could find sites in their niche that have AdSense on them, and this tool is called Google Ad Planner. Type out the directions on how a company can buy placement in your AdSense ad positions, and include it on an “advertise” section for your site.

Who knows, some Fortune 500 company may want to dominate all of the ads on your site for a high-paying click price! After all, anything that gets to Google page 1 for a profitable term is a worthy investment to a company of any size.