Top Bloggers Based on AdWords Marketplace
July 29, 2009 Posted by Tyler CruzI was curious if anyone was bidding on my name in Google AdWords to draw in a certain targeted demographic (basically anyone interested in making money online), so I used the AdWords Keyword Generation and Ad Preview tools to see if anyone was bidding on my name.
The Keyword Generation tool showed that it only cost $0.05 CPC to be in the top 1-3 positions for “tyler cruz” which usually means that there are no advertisers bidding on that keyword, but the Advertiser Competition bar was about 25% full which contradicts the pricing.
I’m not sure if the Advertiser Competition bar is incorrect or slightly inflated, but I did find two ads that appear when my name is searched. However, these ads are totally unrelated to the make money online niche and were most likely generated through automated keyword list wrappers to target as many names as possible with the shotgun approach:
After looking up my name, I thought it would be fun to see the competition on other bloggers in the make money online niche. I entered a total of 12 well-known bloggers in the industry and sorted the results by descending average CPC price to get in the top 1-3 positions. The bloggers, in order from most expensive to bid on to the least were as follows:
| Blog | Avg. CPC |
| Problogger | $2.38 |
| John Chow | $1.26 |
| Shoemoney | $0.86 |
| Zac Johnson | $0.17 |
| Cashtactics | $0.05 |
| Copyblogger | $0.05 |
| Daily Blog Tips | $0.05 |
| Dennis Yu | $0.05 |
| Entrepreneur’s Journey | $0.05 |
| Jonathan Volk | $0.05 |
| Tyler Cruz | $0.05 |
| Uberaffiliate | $0.05 |
Here is a screenshot of the full results: 
There are a lot of interesting things to note:
- Problogger has the highest advertiser competition by far
- The John Chow term costs 68% more than his friendly rival Shoemoney
- Shoemoney has 3x the search volume of John Chow
- Copyblogger is by far the best bang for the buck. My guess is it’s because his blog is more about writing than making money online so the audience isn’t as valuable or targeted.
I didn’t include the bids on domain searches and typos for the sake of simplicity, but there is some action on those as well of course.
For the most part, bidding on these names is actually pretty cheap. There is virtually no competition on most names and you can get clicks for dirt cheap. I’d say it’s a legitimately good way to draw in targeted traffic to your site.
And I’m apparently not the only one to think so. Look what I found with the Ad Preview tool for the search term “shoemoney”:
Other than Shoemoney advertising his paid tools, Jonathan Volk seems to have snuck in and bid on the term as well to advertise his own blog with a rather humorous ad.
If bidding on the search term “shoemoney” is good enough for a PPC baller doing close to half a million a month with affiliate marketing, then this really must be a good way to grab some nice targeted traffic.
Hahaha – I sadly don’t really get much traffic from that ad – It was mostly for Laughs.
I made sure to email Jeremy before doing it.
LOL! But it was hilarious!
Jay
My name is going for $0.15 according to Google. 🙂
if your an affiliate to shoemoney tools, then it might be worth while to test “shoemoney” terms
Problogger seems to be a decent term to go for, but come on…”John Chow”? 😛
-Mike
Yes I also do think paying that much for that “john chow” term is really a stupid thing. The term gets nearly 9000 impressions according to Google which is not a good thing to bid on.
Although shoemoney gets more traffic than John Chow I really think you wil get better traffic from bidding on Jon chow. Reason being is John Chow is know for 1 thing, How to make money blog. Shoemoney could mean the blog or another term dealing with buying shoes or something else.
Unless of course there is another person in the world named John Chow that people search for online. 🙂
I think you would have to be careful with the keyword shoemoney as its tradmarked I believe?
AdWords removed the ban on bidding on copyrighted and trademarked names about 6 weeks ago, so you can once again bid on brand and trademarked names, but you can’t use it in the ad copy.
Not too shocked that ProBlogger is top there. Not only is it a popular name (Pro Blogger) but the blog is also one the best in my mind.
I have not search for my name, I’m guessing since I’m the only Dean Saliba in the world nobody will be using it anyway. 🙂
Let’s be fair, I don’t know half of those people on that list… so they can’t REALLY be top bloggers, can they?
Jay
I never thought about looking into this but it is a clever idea if you have a how to make money blog.
great statistic . this really open my mind about adword
HA Interesting 🙂 I have one person bidding on cashtactics.net 🙂
I wonder if I am a gold mine for a keyword.
Funny analysis, altough, its not 100% accurate
Good luck tyler.. wish you climb higher there… nice to see john n shoe up in the list!
Now that is an interesting post Tyler! Funny. But I’m wondering why no one is bidding on me!
LOL
Haha this is interesting to see people bidding on trademark names, I wonder if it brings them any traffic
Thats a pretty interesting little tidbit about the top bloggers. I see ads for my name also.
your blog is one near at the top.
Interesting statistics, something like I expected to see … this list has all my favorite blogs.
very nice! thank you for sharing that relaxing moment. thanks so much.
very nice site! thanks
Some pretty interesting reading there!
Have you ever used Market Samurai for analyzing and market research?
This really open my mind about adword 😉