Getting Started- Step 2- Keyword Research (Part 2)

You know what good keywords should be now.  You want long tail keywords that have a decent search volume and are not too competitive.  But how do you find these keywords?

There are two ways.  The first way is to buy a keyword research tool.  If you are serious about internet marketing and have some extra money so spare, there are some keyword research tools that will really help speed up this step.

One is Micro Niche Finder, which gives you the “exact” results for a list of keywords and tells you which ones will be easy to rank for.  Simple, but effective.  The other one is called Market Samurai, which is a bit more expensive but does a lot more things too, like analyzing your competition and helps you to find content and backlinks for your website.

But this is only if you WANT to spend that extra money.  You don’t NEED to spend a single penny to do affiliate marketing, so here is the free way to do keyword research.

First, go to this site:  Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  This is a free tool Google made to help affiliate marketers do keyword research for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  PPC is not free though, and I am focusing on free ways to make money.  But can still use this free tool for keyword research for affiliate marketing.

First of all, type in a keyword at the top.  You can start broad if you want and then narrow it down, or start narrow and then find similar long tail keywords.

Type in your keyword, and then type in the CAPTCHA form and click “get keyword ideas.”  It will then do a search and give you 100 or more different keyword ideas.  For an example, let’s stick with “costumes for dogs.”

You can see that there are four columns.  The first one is the keyword name.  The second is advertiser competition.  This means the amount of competition for PPC ads.  Since we are not using PPC, this column does not matter too much…it just means that if the bar is full then it is probably a profitable keyword.

The third column is the “local search volume,” meaning how many people searched for that keyword last month.  Then is “global monthly search” which means the average number of searches for that keyword each month (based on all the previous 12 months).

I usually use the global search volume, so click on that on the top and it will order them from highest to lowest.  Scroll down to results around 1,000 or so monthly searches and start jotting down those keywords.  Again, you want long tail keywords, so try to stick with at least 2 or 3 word phrases.

Once you have a list of keywords with decent search volumes, you need to go back to Google and start checking for the number of competing pages.  Keep the keywords that have low competition and good search volumes.

Keyword research isn’t always fun, and it can be a long process, but it is important if you want to succeed.  These are the only steps you really need for proper research.

Here is a video I found that might help demonstrate the keyword research process a little better if you are a visual learner.  It’s a little quiet, and he doesn’t use “quotes” to check competition, but it does show you more of the keyword tool before you go and use it yourself.

Once you have a list of good keywords, you are almost ready to get to work.  But before you can target these keywords and promote something, you need to know what to promote.

Time for… Step 3- Product Research

Related posts:

1. Getting Started- Step 2- Keyword Research (Part 1)