I need to find a balance of decent paying keywords and content that my userbase will find interesting.. Sure, I could get one click a week on a "dedicated hosting" link and get $1.50, but it gets old checking my adsense after a couple days and seeing that I only got one or two clicks.. Right now, I'm making approximately $.06-.10/click and getting 5-25 clicks per day... If I could find some decent $1 keywords, I could have some nice extra income coming in, but I'm having trouble finding them. My audience is the myspace crowd, so it needs to be geared more towards younger people. Anyone have any ideas?
Search in google for your site relevant keywords and check the "sponsored ads" section. See what the advertisers advertise. You will get the idea.
Higher CTR will not give you more per click, only more clicks and more money. I have site with 0.1% ctr and sometimes get dollar per click. Easiest way is improving the ctr anyway, cause it will bring you more money.
Also, pay little attention to the layout of the page set as my "homepage" I still need to find the time to do a custom backend
More traffic is what is most important to get any growth in revenue and for this you might need more relevant content that your potential visitors are likely searching for. So you might ask the question "what kind of keywords and phrases do i need to target", ...that is something we all are after Think of an subject that you think you can make a relevant and informational site about and that you can get fairly good results for SERP positioning and use Overture suggestion tool to identify the keywords visitors are searching for. Google Adwords is also something that you can use for this purpose. Keyword tracker as well. Use Overture Bid tool to get an idea what the biddings are on keywords you have in mind to determine which is most suitable for you. Don't try to focus to much on high paying keywords because it's most likely it won't work for you. If you get $0,50 for a single click then you have in my oppinion a high paying keyword