Dec
20
Researching keywords can take you a very long way. This is one of the reasons why I recommend to my web design students to read this book before they get involved with website that may or may not be successful. Before I get into the technicalities of researching keywords, I’d like to tell you a story of a failure I had when I first started out in Internet Marketing.I was promoting a guitar course called Amazing Guitar Secrets and it was the first product I’ve ever promoted online. I had purchased Dan Denley’s massive guitar training course and was so impressed with it, I absolutely had to promote it myself. So, I opened up a Google AdWords account, made tons of mistakes, and bid on the dumbest keywords ever. One keyword I used was “Guitar Chords” and I generated hundreds of clicks per day but after a week of sending traffic, I had no sales. I gave up Internet Marketing soon later and decided that affiliate programs were just another “get rich scheme” and there was no way for me to make a living with it.
On a whim, I decided to dive back into affiliate marketing, because I saw so many of my favorite websites gain huge successes as a result. After plenty of reading, I realized WHY my AdWords campaign failed. It wasn’t Amazing Guitar Secrets that caused me to fail-they specifically designed there home page to generate as many sales as possible, obviously the ball was in my court and my failures were my fault. I realized that “guitar chords” was not exactly what the person was searching for. Bidding on such a vague keyword is like shooting fish in a pond. Instead, I decided to bid on something much more specific like: “How to Play Guitar”. By bidding on such a targeted phrase, I finally started getting conversions.
If there is anything I can teach you from my story, it is that researching keywords that work vs. keywords that don’t work are imperative to your success as an Internet Marketer. There are several places you can go to research, here are a few that I recommend.
- WordTracker is probably the best website to use when researching keywords. They do charge a small fee for their service, but you don’t need any kind of subscription if you’re only generating keywords for one website.
- Another service is Keyword Discovery, which is highly comparable to that of the Word Tracker service.
- There are also some free alternatives. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a keyword tool that will help you find relevant keywords in your category called the Inventory Search.
- Google also has a few tools, including their Google Suggest tool and their Keyword Tool for Google AdWords.
- SEO Book also has a wonderful keyword research tool as well.
When researching keywords, it’s also very important to remember that some of the first results these tools give you are going to be very competitive. Many people find much more success by researching “niche” keywords, which help them generate better traffic via organic search results and pay-per-click.
For my Amazing Design Secrets Course, I got into a very competitive market. It wasn’t that there were hundreds of other books just like mine-on the contrary; I have one of the only good web design internet marketing books on the internet-but I was competing against Universities who had web design programs (and were willing to pay as much as $10 per click for their website to be listed in Google AdWords). I had to get creative and go niche, so I tailored my product for individuals who wanted to learn web design to make money. Instead of bidding on keywords like “how to design a website”, I bid on “how to design a website for affiliates” and “how to market a website online”.
Finding the right keywords will save you an enormous amount of time and money in the long run and will bring you plenty of other benefits.
Article written by Andrew J. McClary, © 2008, All Rights Reserved.
Social Bookmarking:
BlinkList
| Blogmarks
| del.icio.us
| Digg it
| FeedMarker
| Furl
| Linkroll
| ma.gnolia
| Netscape
| Spurl
| StumbleUpon
| Yahoo MyWeb
|
Related Posts
Comments
Leave a Reply
