Where To Find Top-Paying AdSense Keywords
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”
How Much Can You Make With AdSense?
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.
Introducing the AdSense FAQ
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.
Dino (August 1, 1991 - September 16, 2008)
I don’t talk much about my personal life in this blog, but today is a sad day because I had to put down my dog Dino. He was 17, which is ancient for a dog, and had almost completely lost the function of his back legs, so it was time. If you’re not a pet owner you probably can’t imagine how sad it makes you feel, even if you’re expecting it. I got Dino from the local humane society when he was about 9 months old, which means he was my constant companion for over 16 years. Our remaining dog will miss him almost as much, as will my wife and daughter. He wasn’t a cuddly dog by any means, but he was my friend and I will miss him.
Review: Article Marketing Automation
Article marketing is an easy way to get links and traffic, but it’s also very time-consuming. If you’re serious about article marketing you’ll try to automate parts of the process, especially article distribution.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that PLRPro was expanding its services to include some new features. One of these new features is the Article Marketing Automation service. It’s free to PLRPro members but is also available independently for $47/month, which is substantially less than the $197/month PLRPro is going to be charging soon for its members.
Article Marketing Automation
AMA is actually two things:
- a network of independent sites and blogs that have agreed to distribute AMA articles; and
- a human-controlled content rewriter
Let’s look at the network first.
The Article Site Network
A key characteristic of an article distribution system is how many sites are in its distribution network. The more sites you can get you content to, the more links you’ll get to your own sites. Unlike other systems, though, AMA isn’t limited to established article directories. Rather, it targets blogs and CMS (content management systems) based sites — any site that has a remote publishing API (application programming interface — a way for computer programs to talk to it) can be added to the network. This includes WordPress blogs (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com), Blogger blogs, Drupal sites, Joomla sites, etc.
Note that you don’t have to subscribe to the service to have your site included in the distribution network. Just sign up for a free AMA account and add your sites to the network.
Sites get added into specific categories on the network, and site owners have the option of seeing and manually approving any and all articles before they get added to their sites. This is a great way to ensure that only quality content makes it onto a site. The only restriction is that site owners are not allowed to modify the links in the articles.
When you submit an article to the network, the article is not broadcast to all sites on the network. Rather, it is “drip-fed” to a few random sites at a time over several days or weeks, and only to sites that match the article’s category. So links build slowly over time, which is a great feature.
Note that unlike every other system I’ve seen, AMA doesn’t restrict you to using links in the “bio box” of an article. In fact, you don’t even need a “bio box” if you don’t want one. You can embed up to 3 links anywhere within the article content. That’s a big plus in my book! You can even vary the links using the article rewriting feature.
The Article Rewriter
The article network is the most important feature of Article Marketing Automation, but close behind is the article rewriting system. Now let me point out that this feature is completely optional: you can submit articles directly to the network with no rewriting and they’ll get distributed with no changes.
Content rewriting is all about generating “unique” (or at least “semi-unique”) content. You do this by replacing words, phrases, and paragraphs with alternate versions that have the same meaning. AMA builds a “unique” article from the alternate text you’ve submitted.
Here’s a simple example:
When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the {red~blue~green~brown~yellow} ones last?
This would generate any of these phrases:
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the blue ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the green ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the brown ones last?
- When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the yellow ones last?
The replacements can include HTML and can even happen inside links. So you can vary anchor text quite easily:
The <a href=”http://www.memwg.com”>{best~most fantabulous~super} AdSense blog</a>
You can even vary the link destinations if you want. You can also nest alternatives within other alternatives.
This is not the first content rewriting system I’ve used, but it’s more powerful than the ones I’ve seen so far because of its flexibility — it’s implemented the way I would’ve done it myself.
Note that article rewriting is non-trivial if you’re doing more than simple synonym substitutions. But if you’re concerned about creating unique content, it’s worth the effort and this system is quite flexible. (There’s also a more traditional wizard-style interface that lets you do rewriting if you’re not comfortable with inserting the special syntax into the content yourself.)
Conclusion
So far I only have a few articles in the system, but the results are encouraging, I’m seeing a bit of traffic already. I can track how many copies of each article have been submitted and published and over time I expect to have lots of links going back to my sites. This system is great for getting backlinks and traffic, and it’s all very whitehat stuff. If you’re looking for an article distribution system, this is the one I now recommend.
And I’m Back…
Actually, I’ve been back for a few days, but I’ve been busy. Some things to note:
- Had a great time in Paris. The waiters are as cranky as usual (they can afford to be — it’s hard to fire anyone and the tips are automatically added to the bills) and I still don’t know how people afford to live there, but it was a nice vacation.
- I didn’t actually publish anything while I was gone, oh well… watch this space shortly for some new stuff, though.
- I may keep this blog on moderated comments for a while, we’ll see.
- PayPal helpfully unsubscribed me from all my services (again!) when I changed the primary credit card for my account. Moral of the story: don’t change the primary credit card, ever!.
- Google changed the HTML used for its search results pages, which basically broke any software that scraped those results. I’ll be releasing an updated to my Article Gatherer shortly because of this. If you’re an AG customer and not on either the PLRSiteBuilder or Article Gatherer mailing lists, contact me off the list to get your update.
- It looks like Google is putting more emphasis on newer content in determining rankings. For example, the Invisible Fence Guide has recently dropped a couple of notches with no real reason. Adding fresh content is the simplest way to keep your site’s rankings ups, but that can be challenging.
- Canadian AdSense publishers using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for their payments might be seeing some bizarre things in their account right now. The August payment was sent using a 1:1 ratio for Canadian to US dollars, which was wrong — we got underpaid. So they’re doing some bookkeeping magic to correct the problem. You’ll eventually see the amount transferred deducted and then readded to your earnings, with an additional payment being sent to offset the underpayment. You may also see a message stating that your account is on hold because of a failed EFT — don’t panic, that’s how they’re doing the bookkeeping magic. Everything should be corrected in a couple of days.
Back to the real world…