The Top Highest Paying Google AdSense Keywords: Do Your Own Research!

I have been writing a lot recently about search engine optimisation, blogging, affiliate marketing, backlinking, and other things which relate to making money online. One thing that I would like to avoid completely is becoming one of those people that makes a living telling people how to make a living, I am certainly not making an online income which I can call a 'liveable wage'. If I was to hazard a guess I would say that 98% of those that try and tell you how to make a living online either a) were not making a living online before they were writing about money, or b) have never made a living online. I read an article recently which claimed that almost all profitable independent websites made their cash by telling people how to make cash themselves, an impossible and unsustainable circle.

Instead, I will tell you how not to make money online - that is certainly an area from which I can draw upon my existing knowledge! I recently read a theory that you need 10000 page views per day to make a living online, well I have 6000 page views per day and make less than 10% of what I would call a 'liveable wage'. That logic is of course completely flawed, as most of my page views are on pages which attract reads on the basis of keywords which make me very little (if any) advertising revenue....... "only write to valuable keywords then",some will shout...... that's all well and good but I have yet to truly find a high paying keyword which doesn't come with some of the internet's best search engine optimisers competing for them! The truth is that I do write to well paying keywords, the result is almost zero traffic, and an occasionally worthwhile bit of revenue. It is my low paying keywords which earn me the bulk of my crust online, in fact about 75% of my income comes from traffic generated by low paying and low competition keywords. Sometimes my days earnings are made up entirely of dozens of clicks between 5c - 20c in value.

I didn't really write this hub to teach you anything new, it was more to put on record my thoughts about those 'highest paying cpc' or 'highest paying keyword' lists, I know for a fact that these lists generate a fair bit of traffic and I hope that some of this traffic now reaches me on this hub! The truth is that anybody who thinks that they will make money by finding these lists is probably going to end up severely disappointed, even those that compile and distribute those lists know not to subsequently compete for the keywords. For somebody starting out in the world of AdSense right now I firmly believe that there is more money to be made finding hugely popular keyword phrases with low competition but with low cpc's. I know of two hubbers that make a fair bit of money by competing for low cpc traffic and then seeking to push it towards higher value pages of online content, or even better to affiliate products on Amazon or Ebay. I would quite like to demonstrate my beliefs here, so I searched for the term 'Highest paying keywords 2010' on Google. This search alone brought me more than 500,000 results!

Now lets look at the absolute crap on the front page. The first result was a torrent file listing '500 High Paying Keywords', I can't criticise the selection as I refuse to use file sharing networks on my new top of the range desktop. I will point out that 'high' is subjective and anybody could type in the term 'MBA' right now on the Google Keyword Tool and find almost 100 'high' paying keywords. It was Google result 3 which really confirmed my suspicions. How this man and his tacky blogger template got that high up the search engines with this phrase I do not know - perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he compiled his list of on December 19th 2009 in time for a Page Rank update on 1st January 2010 (wanker!). What really takes the biscuit is the length of the list, he has listed just 16 keywords (that would have taken him two minutes) and some of them are amongst the most competitive keyword topics on the Internet. I really don't want to give this mans blog credibility by linking to him, in fact I am going to launch a full out assault on getting this page above that one on Google by the time of the next Page Rank update, instead I am going to do a competition analysis for each keywords in it's simplest form. The other complete scandel about these lists are the use of the word 'earning'. The cpc relates to the estimated cost per click to the advertiser, not the amount paid to a publisher, often the publisher will recieve half of the revenue from each click.

Firstly, I should point out that a cpc of £2.68 is in no way unusual or really 'high' at all, I could guess say 200 random words and phrases right now and chances are that 180 of them would be worth more than £2.68. The table above shows just how many people search for the first three keyword phrases on his list, along with how many search results google shows for each phrase. I took a closer look at the phrase 'domains yahoo' which gets 22000 global searches per month, equivalent to 0.002 visits per month for each of the indexed phrases. Of course, most of these searchers will go straight to the top search result which is of course Yahoo's business domain service at smallbusiness.yahoo.com/. Lets assume that the £2.68 paid by advertises for each click on this keyword phrase makes £1.34 to the publisher (that's you or me), we are competing for 22000 people each month. Of those 22,000 people only 1000 will realistically click through to you. There is £1340 per month to fight over for that keyword, that is all. Assuming that every single searcher clicked the top result, and you were the top result, you will make something around this each and every month. A good income of course, but what would it take you to get to the top of Google's front page for this search term? According to SEO for Firefox you will need to achieve a minimum of Page Rank 7 on a 13 year old domain, gather something in the region of 328 million dofollow backlinks, and create such a stir online that you achieve thousands of social networking bookmarks.

To cut a long story short, you are going to be fighting over scraps unless you manage to get on the front page, whilst every one of the sites on the front page has at least several thousand backlinks. You just are not going to achieve through a hubpage, or a blogger blog, and thus this great bit of keyword advice was entirely useless! But this amateur blogger doesn't care, because he is 3rd on Google for people searching for 2010 keywords..... using a post title which incorporates a more moderate keyword worth £0.86 cpc. The morale of this hub, which is in itself pointless, is never to trust anybody who tries to give you keyword tips. If the keyword was a good one, they would be using it themselves, anybody who is serious about making money in this game should at least be spending considerable amounts of time playing with the Google Keyword Tool and using it alongside a valuable analysis tool such as SEO for Firefox - both of those programmes are completely free of charge. The next time somebody tries to tell you what keywords to use, steal their 'real' keywords - just like me. Happy new year everybody :-)