You're having problems because you missed a step ;) You'll need to google "generic product key [your version of windows]". You cannot use activation keys for the installer, you must use the generic keys Microsoft released.
My assumption here is that with the licensing structure change that came with the rollout of windows 8, microsoft was attempting to lock down their proprietary software and prevent users from being able to install Windows without first entering a valid product key in an effort to combat KMS Activators, which Microsoft has never been able to do with any degree of success. However, a problem was discovered within the Windows 8 installer... upon a user installing windows 8 and activating it with their activation key, said activation key would no longer work in the installer and would return an error that it's not a valid product key. Whether this is the actual reason or not, I'm not sure, however Microsoft did make generic keys readily available for Windows 8 after it's release. Then when 8.1 was released, they released generic keys for it (as you cannot use product or activation keys for windows 8 to install 8.1 as 8.1 is an entirely separate OS, not an "update" as it's usually referred to as). You can however use a Windows 8 activation key to activate 8.1, as Windows 8.1 is free and (at least to my knowledge) does not have it's own line of activation keys.