Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason -- Affiliate Marketing Tips, Online Business Advice, Email Marketing and SEO
In this episode, we finally get to that keyword research summary that I have been promising. We also sum up listener reaction to episode 056. Big fun from Kuala Lumpur! All this and more!
This Week Around Late Night IM
This episode was actually recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. What a great trip. As you can hear from the audio quality, recording in a hotel room is not great (but beats no recording at all). I had awesome Dim Sum at a place called
Din Tai Fung in KL. It's my favorite place (they have locations throughout Asia.)
How To Do Niche Keyword Research (Part 1)
In the last several episodes, we've touched on several aspects of how to do keyword research, but they have all been in bits and pieces. In
episode 049 I discussed some things to consider when dealing with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In
episode 053, we talked about finding Niche Keywords and in
episode 054 we touched on Niche Keyword Competition. In this episode, I try to pull it all together for you in a way that hopefully will make some sense. When you are doing keyword research, you basically need to do three things
* Understand what you are trying to accomplish
* Figure out which what keywords are popular
* Understand how hard it will be to rank for those keywords
How to do Keyword research
One note: A lot of times when I say “keyword” I really mean “keyword phrase”. It's the words that people type into Google when the are looking for something.
Increasingly, the search engine is not only Google, but also Bing/Yahoo and other engines as well. Another thing to note is that web search is not the only kind of search. Other really large search engines include YouTube and iTunes. Amazon is another one (but you don't have any control over that one really).
There is a
very cool infographic on SearchEngineLand that gives a pretty good overview of keyword research. We can adapt that model for affiliate marketing and add to it to come up with a process for keyword research.
1. Determine Your Goal
Figure out what you are trying to do. What action do you want the searcher to take when he comes to your site from the search engine. This is called conversion. You want to “convert” a visitor into something else — a subscriber, a facebook fan, a customer, etc.
Usually with affiliate marketing you are trying get traffic to your site with the hope that the visitor will click a link and buy a product that you are promoting.
In the case of the corn sheller site I am ranking for several corn sheller related keyword phrases. One is buy corn sheller online. Clearly, my goal for that keyword (and most other keywords on that site) is for people to end up on eBay and make a purchase.
Another common example might be converting someone to your email list.
2. Brainstorm for keywords
You need to know what people are actually typing into the search engines. There are tools that can help you discover that, but it helps if you will start by imagining what you might type if you were the searcher.
* Put yourself in the mind of the searcher
* Consider the commercial intent of the keywords if appropriate
* Put your list into the Google Keyword Tool
* Think about the long tail.
Here is what
SEOMoz has to say about the long tail…
It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these “popular” search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web.