The third entry in the AdSense FAQ deals with every AdSense publisher’s favorite topic: where to find lists of high-paying AdSense keywords. After all, if you don’t have such a list handy, how do you know whether you should be writing articles about mortgage refinancing ($33.73 average advertiser CPC) or upside down mortgages ($0.08 average advertiser CPC)?

Of course, as I’ve said before, you have to take the values published in these lists with a large grain of salt. Just because an advertiser is paying $30+ a click for the #1 ad spot on Google for “mortgage refinancing”, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get $30+ per click from the ads on your “mortgage refinancing” blog. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee you won’t see anything near that amount…. let alone how you’ll get traffic to your blog in such a competitive industry.

High-paying keyword lists should come with a disclaimer: “For Amusement Only”

My second entry in the AdSense FAQ discusses the question that everyone asks me, especially press types — how much money can you really earn with AdSense anyhow?

More than you think, but also less than you think… most sites are in the “long tail” of the earnings curve. Forget optimization and keyword selection, in the end it’s all about one thing: traffic.

I’ve been thinking about what to write about for this blog, and I think it’s time to put all my experience with AdSense to use in answering some of the questions I get from readers and that I see asked over and over again on various forums and blogs. That’s why I’ve created the AdSense FAQ. I was going to host it here on this site, but I’ve got some weird WordPress issues going on with static pages and rather than figure out what’s wrong I’ve decided to put the AdSense FAQ on one of my oldest sites. If you’re wondering why the page layout looks so dated, it’s because the site is almost ten years old now.

There’s only one question in the AdSense FAQ so far: What is AdSense?, which is a short explanation of AdSense and AdWords (the two are intertwined). Look for more — I’ll post a note here when I put more content up.