Affiliate marketing wouldn't be nearly as hard if more people understood the principles behind it. There are certain things you must do if you plan on making one darn with your efforts.
And the first of those is keyword research.
Keyword research is the online equivalent of market research. Basically, you are determinative how big your market is and how many competitors you are going to have to beat to win market share.
BEHIND MARKETING DEFINITION
Here is a quick summation on how to do keyword research:
In the Beginning
I'm forward you've already chosen a niche and an offer to promote. After that, the opening is to analyze the offer itself and the gross sales page the adman is exploitation to sell it.
What you are looking are cues as to what people will be searching for to find such a solution. These will be "power phrases" that stick bent you as you read the gross sales letter.
As an example, a landing page marketing a dog clicker training product power have a indorsement about how you can house train your dog by exploitation it. This is an important factor and a reason mortal power want to know about this product.
So, here's the keyword phrase I would pull the following from that particular indorsement: "how to house train my dog".
You continue this process until no more keyword phrases stick bent you.
Next, you take these basic keyword phrases and write out every variation you can think of. From our example, I would write down things like:
Ways to house train a dog
How do I house train my dog
Train my doghouse training
ETC.
Do this for all of the keywords on your now growing list.
Compete.com
While I'm generally opposed to exploitation too many tools when you're just starting out, this tool is a major help and it's free to use.
Go over to compete.com and type in the offer page URL into the site visibility section. It will bring back all kinds of data. What we are interested in the top 5 keywords delivering dealings to the website.
Add these to your list, and make a point to write out variations as well.
Google External Keyword Tool
This is other free tool offered by the big G itself. I use this tool in two ways. First, I type in the keywords I pulled from compete.com and my first research to formulate more variations and to get an idea of search volumes. I write down the keywords that strike me as in question to the offer.
Next, I use the website analysis functionality to analyze the offer website. This will give you a list of keywords that Google deems as in question to the webpage.
Write all of these down... we'll need them in the next step.
Competitive Research
This is really a step on its own, but I find it important enough to touch on here. The competition really will determine which keyword phrases are worth pursuing. (Side note: I am also forward you are chasing these keywords for organic dealings as opposed to paid dealings.)(This process is different when determinative competition for paid sources.)
Hope over to Google and type in the keywords you wear your list. Take note of how many different web pages your search brings back... this is your competition. Personally, I keep one's distance from phrases with over 200K competitive pages. This is a mortalal decision though, and you can set your own limit higher or lower.
Next, we need to determine the strength of our competition. Specifically, we want to know how long each page in the top ten is and how many quality backlinks your competitive page has. There are tons of tools for determination out this rather information, but other free option I prefer to use is called SEO Quake. It doesn't cost a dime and is a Firefox add-on... making it very easy to use.
Now what?
So, now you have all these keywords with acceptable levels of competition. You have a product to promote and a dream to chase. You are ready to run... now what?
The next step is to test your keywords exploitation one of major PPC platforms. But we'll leave how to do that for other article.
So, get out there and build your keyword list. Remember how important this process is... it will make you or break you as an affiliate. Good luck!
