The obvious example is with Pay-Per-Click ads, but keywords are also the basis of almost any campaign. For example:

>> Article Marketing

You need to optimize your article for a specific keyword you want it to rank in the search engines or get found in an article directory.

You also use Keyword Anchor text to link back to your web site or ‘money page’ with the keyword you are trying to that for.

Same goes for

>> Video Marketing

>> Social/Web 2.0 sites etc.

>> Your Own Sites Content

In all of this you are trying to attract people to your website based on the certain keywords they are searching for on the internet or attract them from websites that they are on that are related to those keywords.

Here’s My Point, or the Take Away I Want You To Get From This:

You need to target the right keywords so you don’t waste your time or ad budget no matter what sort of marketing you are doing!

At the very least you need to be tracking your traffic and seeing which traffic makes you money.

This is obvious when you are spending money directly on keywords with Pay Per Click search engines. But you should also track when you are using ‘free’ methods such as Article or Video marketing etc.

This way you stop wasting time optimizing your content for rubbish keywords – and only put your efforts into Money Making Keywords.

This may seem obvious but it’s surprising how many people just Don’t Bother – even with Pay-Per-Click stuff.

Crazy!

Here’s another thing:

You Just Don’t Know What Keywords Will or Won’t Convert – until you test!

For example general advice is that broad keywords get more traffic and are less profitable for 2 main reasons:

1) They Have More Competition (because they have more traffic)

2) The People Who Use ‘Em Are Usually Casual Browsers – NOT looking to buy stuff!

In general this is true.

But not always!

For example in one of my niche markets I have found that one of the top converting keywords is just a broad two word phrase!

If I hadn’t have tested it I would have left a lot of money on the table.

The Quickest Way To Test Keywords

Even if your main focus is ‘free’ methods such as article, video, web 2.0 marketing you can still do a small test using Pay Per Click ads.

This is about the fastest way you can test keywords to find the buyers.

Here’s how to do it even without blowing a fortune!

1) Start off with the most obvious buying keywords

For example:

1) Keywords based around a product name

2)  How To or Guide (especially good for info products)

3)  Shopper Mentality Keywords (add these as modifiers to main keywords):

> buy
> buy online
> purchase
> purchase online
> shipping
> review
> compare
> coupon
> discount

2) Set Your Budget At A Daily Level You Can Afford

This might be $10/day if you really are on a budget. Obviously the more you spend in a day the faster you can test.

3) Make Sure You Track To The Keyword Level

This is easy if you are selling you own product, for example with Google you can just use their conversion optimizer which will be in your Adwords account.

If you are selling affiliate products then there is software you will need to buy which will do this for you.

I went over this in a previous post which you can find here:

http://www.publishingsuccessblog.com/instant-adwords-profits-boosters

4) Get Enough Traffic Before Giving Up

Take note of any keywords that get a sale in 200 clicks. Now this may or may not be profitable as far as the Adwords campaign goes. But this isn’t the point.

This Is Just About Finding The Money Keywords!

You have made an investment in your business and have now found the keywords that make you money and you can base your other marketing efforts on those keywords!

Of course if a keyword was profitable on your PPC campaign keep it going and stop the ones that weren’t.

Rinse and repeat with another batch of keywords.

By controlling your ad budgets and testing a small numbers at a time you don’t have to worry about burning through a whole bunch of money to find the Money Keywords real fast!

Speak soon,

Dave.

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If you’re a more experienced marketer then you probably know about this and it’s a given, but you’d be surprised by the number of people that go about this the wrong way!

This is done with the best free tool I use and recommend which is Google’s
which is found here:

http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Anyway it’s easy to be ‘fooled’ into thinking a certain keyword gets a lot of searches when it really gets hardly any.

THIS CAN BE VERY COSTLY

Especially when you start getting backlinks, writing articles, shooting videos
and building new sites…

…all based on trying to rank for a keyword that
gets hardly any traffic!

WHAT’s THE BIG MISTAKE THEN?

Well it’s just the way most people use Google’s keyword tool and also how many other marketers have taught how to use it.

It goes like this:

You type in your main keyword phrase and see what comes up. You then look at the number of searches it gives you for your main keyword and other related keywords.

Lets look at the keyword:

xbox for

Here are the Google search results:

Wow Millions of searches right?

WRONG!

As this is for the BROAD term.

But change the settings for ‘EXACT MATCH’ and it goes right down!

Now the keyword XBOX FOR isn’t something I would go after even if I was in the X Box market. It just serves as a clear example for you

The take away from this is if you want to an accurate idea of how many searches a certain keyword *really* gets then just choose the ‘Exact Match’
option in Google’s keyword tool.

HERE’S HOW

This will be on the right hand side – you should see a drop down menu which will show ‘Broad’ by default.

Just click on the arrow and choose ‘Exact’ instead!

Hope this helps.

Speak soon,

Dave.

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