It's inevitable: someone always asks me what the top-paying keywords are whenever I talk to them about my AdSense book. It was such a common question that I even put a short list in the book, even though at first I hadn't planned on doing so. The usual suspects are things like “online poker” and “loan consolidation”. While I was writing the book, though, I came across the AdsenseAdwords.com site, which had inadvertently plagiarized my AdSense tips page. They ended up giving me a free accont on their site and yes, I can confirm that it seems to be legitimate. You logon and basically you get to see a rather long list of keywords. It looks like they use AdWords to figure out what the value of a particular keyword combination is and basically update the information on a weekly basis. It's one place to look for interesting keywords. (I'm not affiliated with these guys in any way, BTW.) There are other sites that also sell keyword lists, but I haven't looked at those. Really, the lists are more useful if you have no idea what kind of site to build or you want to refine the ads that get shown on your site. If you're just starting out and you have a general idea of what you'd like to write about, some playing around with AdWords (to pretend you're an advertiser) is all that's necessary — this is what I describe in the book.

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