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Make Money Blogging » Make Money Blogging Part 5 | 1020 Words About Keyword Selection
Keyword selection has got to be one of the most confusing subjects of this business. Nothing confuses a newbie, who’s trying to make money blogging, more than the art of keyword selection. This is of great importance because if you don’t execute this part correctly, then all your hard work will be useless. You might get traffic but it wont convert. For all of my keyword research I use Keyword Elite.
Buyers Keywords
You might have already read that you should target buying keywords but what exactly does this mean? I think it will help you to understand keyword selection if you understand how people search for things online.
3 Phases of Research Buyers go Through
There are basically three phases of research a person goes through before they buy a product. If you think about this you’ll see that it makes perfect sense. The first stage is the general browsing stage. This is when you gather up some general info on a product. Let’s say someone is interested in buying an antique music box. See, this is already a small niche but we are going to make it even smaller. OK, so “Leo” (we’ll call our music box researcher Leo) decides to read up a little bit about music boxes and types in “music boxes”.
The results are too general. So Leo refines his search to “antique music boxes” (without the quotes). OK, now he sees that there are some results about antique music boxes. Everything from antique music boxes for sale to the history of music box making and maybe a site or two about the value of antique music boxes.
The Next Stage is the Comparison Stage
So Leo reads up on music boxes and decides that he would like to compare brands. This is the second stage of buyer research. This is when Leo types in “music box review” or “music box comparison”.
Having done some comparing Leo decides that in fact he would really like a Reuge music box. This is the third stage of research a buyer goes though. He has decided on a brand name and at this point he is getting ready to take his credit card out. Whatever he types in next is going to be a buying keyword. It could be “reuge music box” or “reuge music boxes” or “antique reuge music box”. Some “buying phrases” include “cheap reuge music boxes”, “discount reuge music boxes” or “reuge music box with blue top for sale”. Now talk about a buying keyword.
Understand The Buyer and how he Searches
I really think it’s important to understand how people search for things online. The more research they have done then the more specific their search query is going to be. This is because they now know what they want, and it’s your job to put it in front of them when they search for it.
Here’s Another Example
Another quick example: if you are working martial arts equipment and you have a choice of keywords like, martial arts equipment, martial arts gear, kickboxing gear, kickboxing gloves, red kickboxing gloves and red leather kickboxing gloves…you would want to work “red leather kickboxing gloves” as this is the most targeted search. If someone is searching for red leather kickboxing gloves then chances are they want to buy them…not read about them.
We Like This
Now, the cool thing is that the longer the keystring is the less it is searched. This is good news for us because that usually means there is less competition.
How Much Search Volume is Enough but Not Too Much?
You might be wondering how much search volume is needed for a term to be profitable. That all depends. If you are working a keyword that pays a $20 click then you don’t need much at all. If the advertisers are paying only .50 a click then you’ll need 6 or 7 clicks per day on average to make about $100 per month. This is easily done with the kind of trickle traffic we are targeting.
Should You Run Away From a High PR Competitor?
The last thing we need to cover before we wrap up this post about keyword selection is competition. What if you find a great buyers keyword but the top ranking site is a PR5? Should you forget about that keyword and try for something easier? Not until you check your competitions backlinks. Sometimes you will find that a site is ranking number one for your keyword but they haven’t done a single thing to rank for it. They have built no links containing your keyword in the anchor text, they have not optimized their page or site for the term and the keyword isn’t even in the title. You wont know this until you look at your competitions links and anchors.
What Tools do you Need?
I use a program called SEO Elite to do this for me. I simply enter the url of the page that’s ranking number one for my keyword and it shows me how many links they have and what the anchor texts are. I can see right away if they have worked the term or if they are just ranking for it because no one is really working it.
If the big old PR6 at the top of the results is not anchoring my chosen keyword then I know I can beat them. Imagine you’ll have a whole site optimized for this term not to mention the huge numbers of anchored text that I’ll show you how to get later in this series. This is the essence of the whole method. A highly focused site (not just a single page) optimized for a longtail buying keyword with a ton of anchored links. That’s it! That is the recipe.
There’s no Secret Trick
There’s no get rich quick secret and there is no magic bullet. This is how it is done and you can make money blogging this way. You could do this same thing with niche stores for ebay or amazon. The principle is the same whether it’s BANS or affiliate marketing or blogging.
In the next post I’ll be talking about how to optimize your blog. There’s two kinds of optimization: on page optimization and off page optimization. I will be talking about on page optimization first and then in a later post I will cover the more critical off page optimization.
Need Help?
Don’t be shy about asking any questions as I’ll be glad to answer them and help you make money blogging any way I can…and for free.
Tags: keyword selection
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at
11:17 pm and is filed under
Make Money Blogging .
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