August 3, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Keyword Research is so important that I couldn’t really figure out how to fit it into the modules. In most cases it will be the very first thing you do when starting a campaign or a new site. The problem is, in doing our training, we are starting from scratch and keyword research is much too advanced a topic for a beginning Affiliate Marketer. That being said, I felt like we needed to cover how to properly research keywords to use for naming your sites, article writing and marketing, and link building. Somewhere along the line I will implement a keyword module, but for now, this supplement will have to do.

I have seen countless affiliate marketers take on the subject of keyword research and it seems like every single one of us has our own unique spin on things. One thing everyone has in common however, is where we all start. Everyone you meet that does keyword research, starts with Googles keyword tool. So let’s go ahead and open up the keyword tool and take it for a spin. You should see a box that says enter a keyword or phrase. This is where we are going to type in the general idea of what we want our campaign to be about. Since this site specifically revolves around World of Warcraft, we are going to use that. I personally like selling leveling guides, so I am going to narrow down my search even more.

This is one area where I am going to be somewhat different than other marketers. When I do a keyword search, I already have my specific term that I want, so I am going to uncheck the box to use synonyms. I am going to type in leveling guide and click get keyword ideas. So your screen should look something like this when you are ready to submit.

keyword1

Once you hit “Get Keyword Ideas”, you will get a series of results. We want to sort this list by clicking on “Global Monthly Search Volume”. This will rank the terms by the number of searches on average each month. By looking at these results we can see the average Cost Per Click (CPC) for the specific term, the search volume, and the competition for each phrase. I am not too overly concerned with the competition meter at this point because it is only showing the PPC competition levels, and we are going to be aiming for organic traffic, or traffic from search rankings.

Basically what we are looking for are keywords with a search volume of anywhere from 300 to about 10,000. This range should hopefully give us some terms that we can rank competitively for without having to do too much link building and article marketing. Once I find a term that I like, I am going to take that term and put it into Google. When I do this, I am going to put quotations “” around the term. This is going to give me a more accurate idea of the competition level for that term. Ultimately when I do this, I want to see 10,000 results or less. There are times however when I would accept a higher number.

For instance, if I see an ezinearticles.com listing, or a squidoo, hubpages, or other article site on the first page, that tells me that the competition is fairly limited. I can build a site of my own and do a couple weeks of article work and more than likely make the first page. I usually keep going through this process until I find anywhere from 10-25 keywords to use for my article marketing campaigns. So let’s recap what we are looking for.

  • Global Monthly Search of 300 to 8000
  • Search results of Less Than 10,000 with “Quotations”
  • EzineArticles or Squidoo listed on the 1st page
  • Keywords that seem relevant to our overall site topic

That’s really all there is to it. You will hear all kinds of different theories and practices from various internet marketers, but if your terms meet those criteria, you can probably make the first page of Google. The number of search results will determine how hard it will be and how much work you will need to put in to get that ranking, but even with search results upwards of 30,000, you can still get to the top over time, you just have to be resolved in doing so.