“I Don’t Get It! . . I’m Writing, and Writing and Writing but I’m Still Not Getting Tons of Internet Traffic, Search Engine Ranking and the Mercedes-Benz!”
“Psst - The Magic Password is . . . Keyword Research”
Well, maybe not the Mercedes-Benz right away but certainly you can get solid results if you put the horse before the cart. I must admit that I’m equally guilty of writing articles, building websites, and even developing a product or two without the proper market research. But let’s all wake up and smell the coffee! Just because it worked in a Kevin Costner movie doesn’t mean that “if you build it they will come!”
The world is littered with books and products by well-intentioned people who “knew in their hearts” that they built the better mousetrap. But without market research:
- Your ideas are a fantasy about what you think other people want
- You are wasting a lot of valuable time and capital on something that has no basis in reality
- . . . And in the end, you’re just spinning your wheels
Before the Internet, this kind of market research was very expensive but today with Internet Marketing there’s no excuse not to research. Keywords are a very important tool in your marketing arsenal because it’s like a peephole into the desires and motivations of your audience. Here are a few steps that I take before I even think about writing an article or developing a product:
- Brainstorming – use a free keyword research tool such as Google Adwords Keyword Tools to find the keywords and phrases from a core term that people are searching on. What’s really great about this tool is that it’s from Adwords so you know that real people are searching and buying ads for these keywords. This tool will give you a feel for the demand vs. the supply. Don’t edit or reject anything just yet. This step is just to get your creative ideas flowing.
- Discovering your niche - this is the process of finding your gem in a pile of rubbish. Now that you have this huge collection of keywords, you should look for a common thread in certain cluster of keywords. For example, let say that your core term is “dog training” and you discovered a series of phrases for “dog agility training.” You enter the phrase “dog agility training” into the free version of Trellian’s Keyword Discovery. This web based tool will give you 10 variations of “dog agility training” for free (the premium version is $70 per month which in my humble opinion is a bit pricey) and a fairly good estimate of the amount of traffic you can expect a day (this is assuming that your website is search engine optimized or that you are running a pay per click ad campaign).
- Develop your product - with the well researched collection of keywords you are now ready to write your article, develop your website, produce your eBook. The difference is that this time you’re confident you have an audience for your product. (if you really wanted to get slick, Google Adwords Keyword Tools can even show you the seasonal trend and the best month to write about “dog agility training”!)
While the free keyword research tools are great they do require a bit of repetitive work for your labor to bear fruit. If you want some of the tedious work done for you, I would recommend an old workhorse like Keyword Elite.
Keyword Elite is computer based keyword research tool that’s divided into 5 different modules. Each module performs a different research task. For example, Module 1- “Create a keyword list” allows you to gather 10,000 keywords in a few short minutes. Module 2 – “Analyze pay per click listings” shows you the amount bid on these keywords on different search engines such as Google Adwords, Overture or Miva. This information is especially valuable if you want to run Adsense ads on your website or Blog and you want to know the most profitable keywords. This module also shows you the monthly search as opposed to the results to give you a view of the competitive market. There’s a lot more to say about this program but it’s probably more material than is appropriate for a blog. You can tell that I’m enthusiastic about Keyword Elite. I’ve been using it for 3 years now and have found it to be indispensable! If you are interested in Keyword Elite, you can click here to jump to the website. On it, Brad Callan, has tons of video demonstrations. At the very least, you’re sure to learn a lot about keyword research, and search engine optimization!
Until next time, please keep writing and keep posting.
Brad Masterson