I have two sites that both get $1.00 + clicks on a semi regular basis. These sites are both less than 20 days old and started from zero traffic and relying on SEO to get traffic from google. I just wanted to say its possible to get high EPC within the celebrity niche and a proxy niche. I was surpised by talk of all the .01 to .02 clicks people were getting in the celebrity niche. I do get a lot of .01 clicks as well but I am nicely surpised by the number of $.50 plus clicks in this niche. You guys seem to scare people away from celebrity sites. I think if you use the right words on your site you can do well in any niche. This week which is day 11-18 of running a site I have earned $9.00 wtih 2000 impressions. The moral of the story is create it and optimize your site and anything is possible.
To get traffic from SEO, I tried to rank for ten 3 word phrases that had a high KEI. I used these 10 phrases for every link on my site, every picture was called one of the phrases plus 01,02,etc. My meta tags and discriptions are these 10 keyword phrases. Since the site is under 1 month old I am only able to get in the top 20 since my page rank is PR0. I even rank in the top few pages with one or two word phrases out of the 3 word phrase as well. My articles are all basic and use the keywords quite often but not spammy often. To get higher EPC I strategically use other words to get the ads I think pay more to show up. I get about 200 hits a day from google alone now. SEO works as long as your not trying to rank for a top 20 celeb or niche. My recommendation is to pick a up and comer.
UPDATE: Things just picked up in a major way the last couple of days. I have continued to update my site with small news updates and added an adult affiliate program to try to capture spin off business from my site. Since my last post my site has averaged about 200-300 uniques a day pretty steady and adsense earnings averaged about .50 per day not including the last 2 days. The last two days I somehow managed to open the Google search engine flood gates with traffic jumping up to 423 ($2.24) yesterday and 750 ($4.53) so far today with 5 hours left in the day. This has lead to my first $4.00+ day!! I have no idea what happened or is happening but I will report back when things level out. All that is left to say is traffic, traffic, traffic. Total Adsense earnings from site creation date, April 10th: $30.00 Affiliate Income : $50 EDIT: $75!! Just got another sign up as I typed this!!
Assuming a 2% CTR, your CPC will be an average of 22 cents per click, which doesn't seem that great, when you compare with finance, webhosting and SEO niches which get an average CPC of 75 cents.
Though the toolbar PR is 0 (updated once every 3 months), I guess your actual PR should be muh higher. That's how you are able to rank well on the SERP's
Im assuming since its a new site it will be PR 0 for a while. I hope I can keep my ranking and try to claw my way to the first page of google. Also, regarding the different higher paying niches, I just wanted to post about a niche that "doesn't" pay well. It can pay ok and not the .01 clicks I hear about all the time.
Wow, that's great, rank on the 2nd page for the site under 1 month old, do you use a paid SEO service?