You need to ask the right questions, to get the right answer, to your Google Adsense questions. Some popular, yet ineffective questions are as follows: How do I increase Adsense earnings? Traffic. What is the best niche for Adsense? One with Traffic. Highest paying keywords of Adsense? Hard to rank for, one word keywords - See Traffic. How much traffic does it typically take to make X amount of dollars per day? You won't know until you have that much traffic. How many reps does it take to squat 500lbs? You won't know until you do it everyday. Can I make a living off Adsense? Yes The Adsense section here on DP is amazing, and I have learned a lot from the members, and still have much to learn. Rather than bang your head against the wall and try to blend your ads over and over or find that secret long-tail keyword phrase, there are more important, specific questions that can be asked to increase your Earnings, CTR, and the CPC. What you should be asking: 1) What ad unit performs the best? The larger the better...if you can fit the 336x280 you should. 2) Where should I place my adsense ads? Above the fold, as much in the users face as possible (dp ads are a testament to how ad placement should be) 3) What type of traffic converts the best? Search Engine, Social Networks, FB, Myspace, Twitter, Stumbleupon, etc. The Strategy/Action Plan: Cast a large net (traffic). This medium to large amount of traffic will show you a sample size of what keywords/pages are performing the best. If you get 5000 visitors a day for the keyword cars, but realize you make the bulk of your money for the term used red cars, then you can tweak that page to get more traffic for used red cars, or optimize the page (text/content) to ensure Google serves up those high paying ads more often than not. This approach makes more sense than casting a small net (small traffic) and trying to decide from there what to target. Even if you are in a niche you need to cast a large net to figure out what your websites bread and butter will be. Keep in mind Volume X CPC = Earnings, so your big net may reveal a high paying phrase, but yield less net earnings because of its low search volume and/or CTR.
I have to agree with your first points, traffic traffic traffic. Too many people get caught up choosing a high-paying niche or trying to target specific keywords, but all of that doesn't really matter. Make a site about a topic you personally enjoy, and then just draw traffic. If you have an interest in the topic, there's probably enough people on the internet to base a small community of followers around, and you'll surely be able to make money off of them with AdSense.
Hi Notmynic, What I mean is you need to have a relatively large sample size of traffic to determine what your money making keywords will be (couple thousand or so), versus pre-determining a few long-tail keyword phrases that may or may not give you a high PPC or worse, have very low traffic. If your niche is frogs, don't settle for "blue rare frogs" to begin with. Go for "frogs", and from there you will see what keyword combinations bring in the traffic and the $$, and from there tweak.