You need more than high-paying keywords to rake in the bucks

The readers of my book are always sending me interesting questions and comments. Of them was just asking me why he wasn't making as much money as he thought he'd be by targeting high-paying keywords, even though he's getting a lot of clicks.

Now, I've written about high paying keywords before and how people expect to put up web pages targeted at those keywords and sit back and rake in the bucks. First of all, the fact that there are businesses out there selling lists of high-paying keywords and not spending their energies developing sites based on those keywords should make it clear that it takes effort to make a lot of money with AdSense. I think it's easy to make some money with AdSense — certainly enough to pay your costs and turn a small profit — but making lots of money with AdSense is work.

Still, say you have a site that's doing well enough and you're wondering why your per-click average is so low, even though you're targeting high-paying keywords. There are many reasons why those keywords won't pay as much as you think. Here are the most common reasons:

• Those keyword values are the maximum that an advertiser pays per click, but not how much they actually pay — the actual value can be much less, depending on the spread between the advertiser's bid and the next highest bid.
• Advertisers often run simultaneous ad campaigns, one targeted only at Google's search results page and the other targeted at the Google content network (the search results page plus AdSense sites). Guess where they're willing to spend their money?
• Advertisers can now use site targeting to place their ads on specific sites or groups of sites.
• Google's “smart pricing” monitors how likely clicks are to turn into “business results” and automatically decreases the price advertisers pay for the clicks that come from non-performing sites.

These reasons show why it's important to spend your time building quality sites that grow organically (naturally through higher search engine rankings and directory listings) — that's probably the best way to get good payouts in the end.

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