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Saturday, December 9, 2006

Does Adsense Make Any Cents?

By knowing what the most expensive keywords on the internet are, you can create websites, blogs and web pages based on these keywords. On these sites and pages, Google can serve expensive ads that match the content of the sites (based on your keywords) and you could promote affiliate offers that reap high bounties when visitors click on the ads or purchase the products that you are promoting.

The challenge lies in driving traffic to these sites. One way to drive traffic is through search engine optimization, whereby you create a website that ranks highly on the search engines and receive free traffic. This can be tricky and very time consuming. Or, if you already have an existing well-ranked site, you can create new pages linked from your existing pages. This is a little more difficult to accomplish since the pages you are creating may not have anything to do with your original site. A second way to drive traffic is through online advertising.

With regards to online advertising, one key is to understand correlations between keywords. By determining correlations between inexpensive and expensive keywords, you can advertise on the inexpensive keyword (via pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines) to drive traffic to your website that serves ads based on expensive keywords. For instance, advertising on the keyword painting ($0.20 keyword), and sending visitors to your site about the related topic home remodeling ($2.00 keyword) allows you to profit from the wide spread between the keyword prices of the two correlated keywords. This is known as keyword arbitrage. The spread between the two words is your profit. Sounds simple enough, but picking the wrong keyword, can end up costing you a lot of money. For example, I ran a small campaign, spending $25.00. My keyword bids ranged from $.05 to $.011 cents per click. I set the max daily budget at $7.00. Within 3.5 days my budget was gone. The results….I made $7.64. What happened? I used the wrong keywords, I generated 300 clicks from the cheaper words, but the traffic still wasn’t qualified enough. There wasn’t a strong enough correlation between the 2 keywords.

There are two other ways to profit from knowing the most expensive keywords. The first doesn't even require you to own or operate a website. In this method, you advertise using inexpensive means (e.g., via pay-per-click advertising on inexpensive keywords or CPM advertising) and direct traffic to high paying affiliate offers.

The second method is to set up your own search engine. There are several companies that allow you to easily set up a search engine that serves PPC ads syndicated from Google, Overture or other PPC search engine networks. Once you create your engine, you can drive traffic directly to your PPC results, and get paid every time someone clicks on one of the results. Likewise, on your search engine's home page, you can include many links to expensive keywords, so that when someone clicks on it, the engine shows expensive ads based on those keywords.

Understanding keyword pricing is critical to the online advertising, PPC search engine and affiliate marketing businesses, businesses that combine for over $25 billion a year in revenues. With a market of this size, generating substantial profits, if you have the right information, is really not that challenging. I just want a small percentage of this, don’t you?

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