August Adsense Earnings

Well, August is over and it marks a bit of a turning point in some of my tactics. I'm getting more into the keyword research side of things. Keyword research is something that I really haven't done well, or done much of up to this point. I've really had the ranking for a keyword side of things down. I know how to rank for keywords. Some take longer to rank for than others, but I know what it takes to compete there. What I haven't been good at is identifying high paying or high traffic keywords. So, one of my first revelations was the targeting of higher paying keywords. I spent some time developing out a few ideas to work on that and saw some good benefits in just a few days.

Then I ran across something that reminded me of Googles hot trends. Every hour of the day you can check the hot trends with google and you will see an updated list of what the 100 most searched for things are on the internet. I skimmed the list and it was really mostly celebrity stuff, but I found a few ideas that were related to one of my sites and so I did some quick writing and racked up quite a bit over a couple days. I think the first of those days was the end of August which helped to push August earnings well above July.

So, I made $382.51 with adsense in August. Adding that to some of my other streams put me over $400 and September is looking promising.

Now, google hot trends usually are things that come and go. So, the good traffic I got out of the one or two that I targeted lasted about 3-5 days. I'm still getting about a hundred visits a day on one article on the topic, but I must say I haven't done much work targeting the keywords with backlinks since the first night I worked on it. That evening I threw out a few articles that had a few targeted keyword backlinks as well. I recycled the article from the main site for posting on a few other sites, bookmarked and really was in the top 10 for the first couple days on my main site.

But, it really underscored something else that I've ignored TOO much and that is simply good keyword research is a good first place to start. I had done some keyword research before but because I didn't know what I was doing.... well things didn't turn out the way I expected. For instance, I would use googles external keyword tool and find a good looking traffic keyword that made good CPC for the search ads. Now, I never thought I'd get that much for an ad, maybe 25-50% of that search CPC, but it was a good way to filter out the chinsy search phrases and find some valuable things to write on.

What I neglected though was the distinction between broad and exact search machine. Take the keyword phrase baby bottles for instance. It may have 100,000 searches a month broad match because the broad match includes the people searching for glass baby bottles, plastic baby bottles, disposable baby bottles, etc. ANYTHING that includes those 2 words. Exact match though, may only have 5,000 searches a month. (I don't know for this phrase, haven't run the numbers for it.) Exact match is ONLY those people searching for EXACTLY the phrase baby bottles with no extra wording.

So, some of the keyword phrases I was excited about a month or two ago I've gone back and looked at with exact search and can see why I'm not getting the traffic I expected. Because I was looking at broad search and while broad search may get 100 search views a day, the exact search may only get 10 search views a day. So, I've been busy now doing a lot of keyword research prior to writing so I can have a good list of higher traffic and lower competition keywords for each site that I can go back and try to renovate some of my existing sites and start out with new sites with a slightly different perspective. It's certainly not guaranteed success, but it raises the odds somewhat.

It's also a good point to take the google keyword traffic numbers with a grain of salt. I've seen some people suggest throwing up an adwords ad for the keyword phrase and really see how many impressions you get, but that's not something I've tried (yet). It may be worthwhile at some point.

So, anyway I'm seeing some good trends and learning some good resources for keyword research