The Wealth Gang

While you most certainly can make money online without doing any sort of keyword research, it can help keep the traffic and income pouring in. Doing your keyword research isn’t rocket science, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. There are many tools you can purchase or subscribe to in order to help you get the most profitable keywords and uncover hidden gems, but I recommend first learning how to do this on your own without the paid services.

Knowing how to do keyword research is an essential skill to the Internet marketer and is something you can quickly learn and perform on your own. The purpose, of course, of keyword research is to find the popular terms and phrases that people punch into Google in order to find what they’re looking for.

“Stop dog barks” and “make dog stop barking” for example are the same problems people are trying to solve, but one could result in hundreds of more searches a month. That’s the one you want to optimize your content for.

But you’re not just looking for the terms with the highest search volume. There is a sweet spot between the most highly searched keywords and and the least amount of competition that you want to find. In short, the less competition there is, the easier it will be to get your content ranked on the top of Google for that search term. The theory is that if you have an easier time getting your blog post in the #1 spot of Google if there are only 3,000 search results for that keyword than it would be if there were 3,000,000 search results.

Depending on the search volume, however, you might be better offer being in the 20th spot of a keyword that gets thousands of searches a day versus the first position for a keyword that gets only a couple searches a day. Make sense?

You want to be ranked for the keyword that gets you the most free search traffic, and doing that either comes down to either luck or initially by doing proper keyword research.

So how do you do proper keyword research?

First, get yourself familiar with some of the popular free keyword research tools. Each have their limitations, flaws and benefits — any free tool will. My personal favorites for as far as the free tools go are…

• Google Keyword Tool
• Free WordTracker

If you are looking for something more sophisticated, more accurate, and will give you the most profitable keywords, then you need Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite. At one point or another you’ll want to invest in this software as it will become one of your most valuable tools as an Internet marketer.

Got your keyword tools now what?

There’s two angles you can go here… generally speaking you want to create content for humans first and search engines second. In the end, Google will favor sites that have valuable content that is engaging. So, first have an idea of what you are creating — know your  blog content or what your video is about first.

Then head on over to your favorite keyword tool and put yourself in the mind of someone searching for your content. What would they type? What problems do they have? What other words or phrases are there for your topic? Punch those in to your search tool to see what words receive the most amount of searches.

The results should also spark some ideas for other keywords and phrases that you didn’t even think of.

Compile a list of these words, and start doing some background checks on your competition to find that sweet spot — the one that is going to give you the most traffic and easiest position to dominate in Google.

One other thing to consider… when doing your keyword research, also consider the keywords that will convert for you the best. If you are promoting a dog training eBook on your site, focus on the keywords that show there is an immediate need for a solution or that someone may already have their credit card out ready to buy.

Here’s a hint… anytime the term “review” is in the keyword phrase, that person searching is a hot lead. They are ready to buy, but just need some help in making their final decision.

If you are making money from Google AdSense, consider the keywords that costs the most to advertisers… that means each click will result in more money for you. This is generally topics such as dating, payday loans, credit, stocks, diet/weight loss, etc.

If you want loads of free traffic coming to your website, it is absolutely critical that you learn how to do proper keyword research in order to make loads of money. When I first learned about this concept, I resisted to learn how to do it properly and take the time to use the proper keywords in my content.

That was dumb.

You can produce the most informative article or video, but without proper keywords, no one will ever find it. I would spend an hour or two carefully crafting my online publications to make sure they were well written, engaging and informative, but failing to take 5 minutes to do keyword research was a mistake. It’s the difference between massive amounts of traffic and dribbles of squat.

I’ll give you an example… There is an article on another blog of mine that I optimized with the right keywords. Before I did that, I got some initial views from my regular readers. After that it just got pushed down the archives… never to be read again. When I went back and made a few changes in the title and first sentence of the blog post, it started to get 100 views a day just from Google.

So what did I do next? I put a link in there to a relevant product being that paid me a $4.50 commission for every lead I send, and for the past year I’ve been making roughly $12 a day from that one article whereas before I made zilch. That doesn’t even take into consideration the new subscribers I receive or AdSense clicks.

While $12 doesn’t seem like a lot, when you have 100+ of these types of articles, it all ads up. Plus, $12/day is over $300 a month, which could be a car payment.

Learn to like and love keyword research. It will increase your income 10-fold to make all the time and effort you put into your online business well worth it. You’ll increase your traffic, and because your traffic will be more targeted, you’ll increase your conversions as well. Don’t flake out like I did.