In the last module, I covered how to build an Investigative Site so that you can test out your niches as quickly as possible. 

Now that you have a good affiliate program selected in a particular niche, you need to follow this philosophy:

Do not initially waste your time building a website and getting links. What you really want to do is figure out (and figure out quickly) which searchers are going to want that product. To explain it differently, you want to uncover the exact keywords that are typed in by the buyers.

Here’s an example (it’s obvious, but I need to drive this point home with you):

If your niche is ‘dog training’ and you’ve selected a dog training ebook from Clickbank, you can bet money that people typing in ‘georgia attorney’ are not going to be interested.

Right?

Right. That’s just plain ridiculous.  And at this point, you won’t be able to get this by the quality score in your pay-per-click campaign.

People who type in ‘georgia attorney’ are looking for attorneys in Georgia, so the last thing you want to do is advertise a book on dog training to these folks. You’ll waste your money and worse yet, your time.

What about people who type in ‘pets’? Do you think some of them might buy your dog training ebook? Maybe, but that’s still too vague. Pets might also include folks with cats, fish, iguanas, monkeys, turtles … you name it. If you took out a paid ad (like a pay-per-click ad) on this keyword to advertise the dog training eBook, you will most certainly spend much more than you would ever make.

The word ‘dog’ is closer, but you would still never want to pay money to advertise for it with pay-per-click (PPC) ads. The problem is there are way too many reasons someone may want to search for the word dog. They may be thinking of buying a dog, they may be looking for a particular dog related product, or they may just not know what they want and are using the word as a starter search. You would still lose out if you paid for a PPC ad like this.

I never see anyone talk about this, but it’s pretty crucial. Keyword searches do not occur in a vacuum. You may see a high volume of searches for a particular keyword, but it might just be a word that is often used to find a better search term. The folks searching with it might not be buyers. It might just be a research word. I would bet that ‘dog’ is just a research word, therefore, you’d never want to bid with it.

If we qualify further, we could come up with ‘dog training’. People searching with the keywords ‘dog training’ are a good bet (it’s our exact niche after all). You know they want to train a dog so that’s a pretty good match to the product you are promoting. But I would bet this word is close to a ‘break-even’ word, meaning if you bid on it with a pay-per-click campaign, you would likely just break-even. You would need a highly converting sales page or sales process to make a profit (which is still possible to achieve).

And this is where most folks online are missing the boat. They want to promote a book on dog training and they buy pay-per-click ads for the word ‘dog training’. Maybe they also think up ‘dog obedience’ and slap up a couple of other obvious keywords as well.

But if you dig deeper, I can guarantee you there are many more phrases you will see much higher conversions with.

For example, surfers typing in ‘dog training online’ or ‘dog training course’ would be even more qualified than those just searching for ‘dog training’. They are typing in essentially exactly what you are offering.

The closer you can get to what you’re selling the better.

People trying to train their dog for a particular problem are also potential buyers. Folks typing in, ‘stop dog bark’ or ‘teach dog to walk’ are definitely potential buyers of a dog training ebook.

In some markets, searchers actually type in the word ‘buy’ before whatever they’re looking for. You can bet these people are surfing with a credit card in hand. You want to make a list of as many of these trigger words as you can come up with.

You’ve probably also heard that the name of the product is a highly converting keyword. It definitely is, so don’t forget to add that one to the mix.

So forget the website and link building activities for now. What you really want to spend your time on is coming up with a list of words like these. You need to dig deep. This part is very important.

You are going to uncover all the words you can, do a little spying, and then you’ll test out the keywords. There is no other way to know whether particular words and phrases will convert or not without testing them. Adwords is perfect for this. Here’s how I get my keywords…

To generate a massive list of keywords pretty quickly, I use Wordtracker. You can purchase a week pass for fairly cheap. There are free services out there and software tools that you only pay for once, but I really like Wordtracker.

If you don’t want to pay for anything, then use the Good Keywords tool. You may find it here… http://goodkeywords.com/. It’s a downloadable tool that is pretty powerful, especially for free. There are many other programs and memberships that you may already own. If so, I would use one of them instead.

If you’re going to use Wordtracker you should start with the Keyword Universe Tool. I’ve put together a short tutorial for using Wordtracker the right way here:

Building a Keyword List with Wordtracker

And once you compile your list of related words, you’ll want to put them into Excel, which you can do by following the tutorial here:

Convert Wordtracker List to Excel Spreadsheet

Once I have a list of keywords and phrases into Excel, I start analyzing them.

I like to organize the words by theme and I suggest you do so as well. You can use the find and search function in Excel for this (in my version, it’s under “Edit”). Here’s a screenshot:

So if we stick with the dog training example, words that would be on my theme list might include ‘house training’, ‘housebreaking’ and ‘dog obedience’. These are examples of themes. Themes are always just a word or two (three at the most) and are highly searched. You would see other words added onto them like ‘housebreaking my dog’ or ‘dog obedience training’.

Obviously, ‘housebreaking’ is the main theme and ‘housebreaking my dog’ is a keyword that would go under the theme (we’ll cover that in a minute). For now, I would set the themes aside and think about whether I want to create an ad group for each of them. I usually like to find about 6 to 12 themes initially.

You’re going to have to partly rely on your intuition and common sense for figuring out which themes would be more likely to earn you money. You should also pay special attention to any ‘buy’ words and the product name itself. Make sure to pull these out of the Wordtracker lists.

I did say partly rely on your intuition, right? That’s because you can also use Google to help you determine which types of products are already being advertised for particular keywords with Adwords.

To spy, I just type in my keywords, one-by-one and take stock of what’s currently advertised on the first and second page of the results. If someone else is already advertising there (especially for a product like the one you are promoting), they are probably earning some money. If they’re earning, then you have a good chance of earning as well.

Definitely keep the themes that show ads promoting products similar to what you’re planning to promote.

I would also go to my Google Adwords account (if you don’t already have one, get it set-up), and use the “tool” feature. Click on “traffic estimator”. This tool will provide you with a way to gauge how much traffic you will receive at a certain bid price.

I really love this tool. If you find that the word doesn’t bring in much traffic at all, then it’s not a good choice for a theme. Without traffic, you’re not going to see many conversions.

Here’s an example…

By using the Adword’s Traffic Estimator, we can confirm that the words “dog training” are searched quite a bit. According to the tool, we will get between 74-110 clicks per day with just a bid price of 15 cents per click. Remember, this tool only provides you with an estimate. I don’t trust it right down to the range given, but if it says I’ll get a bunch of clicks at my low bid price for just the main theme keyword, I take that as meaning it’s worth it to set up a theme for it.

You now need to organize your list of keyword themes. Remember, you would like between 6 and 12 to start with. You can always add more later so don’t spend all week on this one task.

Again, I consider the theme keywords to be the ones with a higher hit count and fewer words. Organize your keywords by theme (remember, you do not need to use them all). Just try to focus on the one’s that you think would convert for the product you chose to promote. If you’re using Excel, you can use the find tool and type in the theme. For example, if ‘dog obedience’ happens to be one of your themes then type it into the “find tool” in Excel. You will be shown a list of all the keywords that have the words ‘dog + obedience’ in them.

So on your piece of notebook paper or on your computer, type out ‘dog obedience’ and put all the words Excel found that have a decent daily hit count (at least 10 or above) underneath it. Only put in the words that make sense for the product you are promoting.

For example, we are promoting a dog training ebook. So “dog obedience schools” is probably not a good keyword. My intuition tells me that these surfers are already planning on taking their dog to a school and may not be interested in an ebook. You should follow your own intuition when creating your list of keyword themes.

Do this for each theme. You now have a highly organized list of potentially converting keywords that are ready to plug into Adwords. But before we get to Adwords, let’s set up our landing page.  I’ll cover this next in the Landing Page Intelligence module.

As you explore the world of internet marketing, you’ll probably come across the phrases “keyword” or “keyword research” on more than one occasion. But what are keywords and why should you care about them?

Think about what happens when you go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo. If you’re looking for information on cruise deals for your next vacation, you might enter the word “cruises” into the search bar to find websites related to vacation deals. That word you entered is what’s referred to as a keyword. If you entered a string of words, say “best cruise deals”, you’ve entered a keyphrase into the search engine.

Searchers use keywords to find information on the internet.

The keyword or keyphrase tells the search engine what kind of results to bring back for you. Search engines scour the internet, recording the information they find on various sites around the web. When you enter the keyphrase “best cruise deals”, the search engines comb their databanks to find sites related to “best cruise deals”.

When you’re building a website, choosing the keywords and phrases to focus on is extremely important. You want to target the keywords people are actively searching for. But as you can imagine, some keywords are more competitive than others. An example of a general keyphrase is “lose weight”. It’s much more competitive than the keyphrase “lose weight with the lemon juice diet”.

If you build a new site around the phrase “lose weight”, you’ll be competing with well established websites and likely find your site buried on page 89 of Google’s search results for the term.

Where your site falls on the search results pages is measured as its ranking. For the general keyphrase “lose weight”, you’ll likely be low in the rankings, so your site won’t receive much traffic or exposure.

On the other hand, if you focus on less competitive keywords, you can expect to rank much higher in the search engine results – you may even be able to land the much-coveted first page ranking.

This is why good keyword research is vital to the success of your online business. Focus on less competitive keywords and you can expect to rank much higher in the search engine results. Focus on lots of less competitive keywords and you’ll get lots of free traffic.

Ideally, you want to find keyphrases that have high search volumes and low competition. The two go hand-in-hand – the phrase “make your own digital camera using a potato” likely has low competition, but it won’t matter if no one ever searches for it. The experts argue back and forth about exactly what type of numbers you should be looking for – “search engine results of less than 500,000″ or “at least 1,000 daily searches” – but it will be up to you to determine which parameters work best for your internet business.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you optimize the individual pages of your site, not just the home page. So you don’t just pick one keyword or keyphrase. You need to select a number of them and set up an actual strategy for ranking high for all of them.

To conduct your keyword research, you can take advantage of a number of free or paid keyword research tools. One of the best free research tools is available through the Google Adwords program, although you can find other good options at SEOBook.com or by searching online. If you’re looking for programs that offer added functionality, look into WordTracker’s subscription service. Any one of these programs will help you identify keywords and keyphrases with high traffic and low competition to build your web pages around.

Additional Articles in the SEO Tutorial Series:
SEO Module 1 – SEO Introduction & Keyword Research (Watch Online Video)
-Part 1: What is SEO?
-Part 2: Keyword Research
-Part 3: What is LSI?
-Part 4: What are Long-Tail Keywords?

SEO Module 2 – On-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 5: On-Site vs Off-Site
-Part 6: On-Site Optimization Details
-Part 7: What are Meta Tags?
-Part 8: What is Anchor Text?

SEO Module 3 – Off-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 9: Off-Site Optimization
-Part 10: Directory Submissions
-Part 11: Article Submissions
-Part 12: Press Release Submissions
-Part 13: Forum & Blog Commenting
-Part 14: Social Bookmarking
-SEO Tutorial Conclusion

I’ve written a few articles on Duplicate Content.  Basically, I believe you need to have unique content on your site if you want it to be competitive in the search engines.  If you want more details on Duplicate Content, please refer to my previous articles … ‘PLR and the Search Engine Connection’ and ‘The 2 Types of Duplicate Content’

As you know, it’s not just enough to rank high and get traffic from search engines. You have to have something of value on your site. Good content is one thing, but keeping people’s interest is another. Therefore, you also need the tools for planning out your site’s content (i.e. in-depth keyword research and analysis) along with a strategy for using them.

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