Adsense Marketers- I need your advice

[honed]

Well, maybe I don't need it just yet. But I sure could use it.

Layoffs that happened yesterday left me worried that I am next. So, I thought that I'd look for a new job and also try my hand at Adsense to keep my head above water if that became necessary.

I looked at some good keywords that I am familiar from with from work and they get ~9K monthly searches each and pay $6-8/click in Adsense. How do I capitalize on that? I haven't Googled it, but thought to ask here.

I know little about that side of things. Is there a good primer I can read or other resources? I hope it doesn't become necessary, but I need to explore all avenues.

It wouldn't take me but a few minute to deploy a WP site, so I hope that if I learn a bit more, I can keep my head above water should it become necessary.

Thanks!

[Mike Grant]

Have you looked at the competition?

[simonbuzz]

Pm me and I will give you a free ebook that I purchased recently that might help you choose keywords...

[powerspike]

Greetings Honed,

There is LOTS of threads on the forums about keyword research, a quick search will find most of them =)

Basically what you need for a keyword to be good for adsense are the following (these are just the basic's)

1) CPC of $1+ (you have covered this)
2) Decent amount of searches (you have this covered as well)
3) Low to medium competition, ie are all the sites on the first page high ranking sites, if there are lots of urls which are the base domain, it's a bad sign. A couple of good signs would be places like article directories, other "MFA" sites, and sites like amazon etc.
4) Is it a buying word / phrase. The CPC would indicate it is, but if it's not, the CTR would be very low, where as on a buy word it would be very high (we are talking about less then 1% compared to 20%+).

There is alot more to keyword search, but those i would consider the absolute basic things you need to cover.

- Justin

[honed]

Thanks to you all. I wasn't really clear in my haste to post.

I know the keywords, I work with them daily. There are 3 or 4 long tails that are a medium competition and if I spend some time and money, I can likely get on page 1, maybe a top spot. At a 1% CTR, that's about $630/month. There are 3 more keywords like this. Also, is a 1% CTR accurate to use for estimating? I just bought Niche Finder since my previous post and it confirms what I already knew and none of the keywords is more than medium competition. It gave me 2 possible others as well.

I need advice on the actual site. What do you do for content when you are looking to capture clicks? What works best? A blog? An article filled site on the subject? I thought of a wordpress site and optimize on page and then do some article marketing etc to get ranked. Is there some thought on how you can improve your CTR? I'd guess that might be achieved by the longer that people are on your page reading your content. These are things I'd love advise on.

[paulgl]

You will not get anywhere near top dollar for a click on a
brand new site. It could take weeks or months.

Do you have an adsense account yet?

Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can just slap a site
up, the traffic will come, and you will get high paying clicks.

It doesn't happen that way.

With so many questions, a good free way to start would be to
read this part of the forum.

You can make money no matter what the niche is.

For someone starting out, $6-$8 clicks is unreasonable. Especially
on a quick, on going, regular basis.

Paul

[honed]

That is exactly the kind of info I was looking for.

I didn't think it would be easy, but I really appreciate you candor. The $6-8 is the CPC, so I didn't expect that. Less than half, I thought.

No, I don't have an Adsense account yet. Does it help that I have had an Adwords account for 5+ years?

I'll spend some time here and see what I can find. Thanks for your post.

[masterjani]

You can check the keywords Whether it is highest payable by seeing the click through rate.Create a seperate channel and track the things

[honed]

I've been reading all day. To be clearer, I know how to write articles, I can backlink and buy them too. I will always be working on SERP and traffic, I know what I'm doing on those.

The part I am learning about in Adsense is what are good keywords and what you actually do on a micro site/Adsense site. I know you DON'T want a MFA site and you want to write articles and posts, on topic and engage the visitor. So far, I'm just not so sure about the keywords.

The first keywords I thought to use seem to be the best ones so far. Niche Finder confirmed. I didn't seek these out, these are keywords I use for work, but never looked at them from an Adsense POV.

K#1 3,600 searches/month CPC:$9.25 competition - medium
K#2 4,400 searches/month CPC:$7.69 competition - medium
K#3 4,400 searches/month CPC:$7.69 competition - medium
K#4 33,000 searches/month CPC:$7.74 competition - medium - 33MM search results
K#5 5,800 searches/month CPC:$5.58 competition - medium

Are these reasonable traffic numbers? I'm going to experiment and my hope/beliefs are that in a month or two, with high enough rankings and enough backlinks, that I might see $5/day per site. I used a formula posted on a WSO that, if correct, means the above sites (excluding #4) would earn a minimum of $150-160/month if at the top of page 1.

If that were the case, and I could grow 5 more like it, I could be unemployed for a while or even not get laid off and bank some cash.

masterjani- I am kind of following you. Can you elaborate?

[socialbookmark]

The traffic of keywords is not bad but you should note if you rank #1 for a keyword which is searching 3,600 times per month, you get at most 2,500 visitors and for these 2,500 visits, if the CTR to be 3%, you get 75 clicks and i am not sure that you get $9 for each click. Maybe $2 or something like it. I want to say you that the situation is more difficult than searching for keywords and their CPC. The money you earn for a click depends on some known and some unknown factors too in my opinion.

[powerspike]

Greetings Honed,

The way i evaluate If a keyword is worth going for (on a CPC / income level) is the following:-

1) CPC * 30% (only the top click will be $X dollars, it does down from there - google take 1/2)
2) #1 Ranking - 40% CTR to site, #2 15% to site, #3 10% to site - 4-9 3-5% to site (i usually go with 4%, and #10 - 10% click (i know it's weird - i as much CTR from #10 as i do from #3 - i think it's because have to scroll to the bottom - so ignore what is in the middle)

3) i go for "action/buying" words, so plan on a 10% CTR Onsite

Ok how does this work ?

Just say, the CPC is reported as $8 (and there is a lot of competition for adwords - i'll explain this below). and the monthly searches are 2000.

($8 * 0.3) * .1 (#3 ranked), * .1 (ctr on site) * 2000 (searches), in this example - that would be $48/month for a #3 rank in google for the keyword.

Now, to try and stop a massive fight over calculations, there is no "right" way to workout how much you can earn, everyone does their own estimation and this is how i do mine, and so far i have found it generally within the right area =)


Ok, About adwords advertisers, if the top bid is $8/click, and there's 20 advertisers, the 2-4 position should be close.
However, if there's only 3 advertisers for the keyword, you might find that position one is $8, then the next one is $1 and the next one 20c. You need to make sure the competition is very strong or you'll get caught with very low click rates.

i Hope this has helped somewhat, if you have any questions or i haven't explained something well, let me know and i'll try provide more details.

- Justin

[WealthWithin]

Originally Posted by honed

I've been reading all day. To be clearer, I know how to write articles, I can backlink and buy them too. I will always be working on SERP and traffic, I know what I'm doing on those.

The part I am learning about in Adsense is what are good keywords and what you actually do on a micro site/Adsense site. I know you DON'T want a MFA site and you want to write articles and posts, on topic and engage the visitor. So far, I'm just not so sure about the keywords.

The first keywords I thought to use seem to be the best ones so far. Niche Finder confirmed. I didn't seek these out, these are keywords I use for work, but never looked at them from an Adsense POV.

K#1 3,600 searches/month CPC:$9.25 competition - medium
K#2 4,400 searches/month CPC:$7.69 competition - medium
K#3 4,400 searches/month CPC:$7.69 competition - medium
K#4 33,000 searches/month CPC:$7.74 competition - medium - 33MM search results
K#5 5,800 searches/month CPC:$5.58 competition - medium

Are these reasonable traffic numbers? I'm going to experiment and my hope/beliefs are that in a month or two, with high enough rankings and enough backlinks, that I might see $5/day per site. I used a formula posted on a WSO that, if correct, means the above sites (excluding #4) would earn a minimum of $150-160/month if at the top of page 1.

If that were the case, and I could grow 5 more like it, I could be unemployed for a while or even not get laid off and bank some cash.

masterjani- I am kind of following you. Can you elaborate?

I highly recommend that you don't go after keywords higher than $3 CPC and more than 15k search volume. You'll probably be wasting months trying to get any results. Even when you get a top ranking, the competition is so high, it takes more effort to maintain the rankings.

How many AdSense sites do you see for extremely competitive keywords? Not many. That's because they can earn many times more by just selling leads or selling the product directly.

I suggest that you read the 'XFactor's original thread in this forum to learn some basics.

And no, having an AdWords account for 5+ years doesn't give a special preference in AdSense.

It takes several months (often years) to see a sustainable income to replace your day job with AdSense. It is is not a get rich quick method. No one can advice you on the ideal CPC, CTR etc. The data you get from the keyword tool is not highly accurate anyway - but it's a good start. Start small, experiment and build on the results.

Good luck!

[honed]

Originally Posted by socialbookmark

The traffic of keywords is not bad but you should note if you rank #1 for a keyword which is searching 3,600 times per month, you get at most 2,500 visitors and for these 2,500 visits, if the CTR to be 3%, you get 75 clicks and i am not sure that you get $9 for each click. Maybe $2 or something like it. I want to say you that the situation is more difficult than searching for keywords and their CPC. The money you earn for a click depends on some known and some unknown factors too in my opinion.

Thanks. I really wasn't too sure of the traffic. I haven't begun to search for keywords, these are keywords from work. Only later did I look at then for Adsense and after that, I ran then through Niche Finder as well.

I also looked at the sites behind the tops spots, as some of the ones I didn't choose might take a while to unseat. THe CPC is high, but that wasn't how I chose them and I know you don't the whole amount! Google does split and if I get $2 to start off that and the site at least pays for itself, great. Then I can work on improving.

[honed]

Originally Posted by powerspike

Greetings Honed,

i Hope this has helped somewhat, if you have any questions or i haven't explained something well, let me know and i'll try provide more details.

- Justin

Thanks Justin!

I am trying to get an idea of what to expect. I know this isn't going to make money without being at the top and you've set some expectations for me. I'm trying to learn this as I go and if I can get one working well, I'll do several more and with a goal that I can have them earn $100/mo in profit.

[honed]

Originally Posted by WealthWithin

I

It takes several months (often years) to see a sustainable income to replace your day job with AdSense. It is is not a get rich quick method. No one can advice you on the ideal CPC, CTR etc. The data you get from the keyword tool is not highly accurate anyway - but it's a good start. Start small, experiment and build on the results.

Good luck!

Thanks for your post and for the suggestions. I have been reading all day yesterday to get a handle on the Adsense part, as I have the others in hand.

I am not looking to have this be a get rich quick, not by a long shot. It just occurred to me that I have enough skills that if I learned how to become an Adsense marketer with a little success, in time, I might be able better float if I lose my job or add to savings if I don't. If I liked it and were good enough at getting results, then maybe I'd do it full time if possible, but a thought for another day.

I really appreciate that you and other posters here made sure that I didn't think that I was going to replace the job anytime soon. I did think it would be possible in months, but didn't think years. I'll experiment and read Xfactor's thread next.

Thanks for the help!